The Life and Milieu of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke

underneath this sable herse
Lies the subject of all verse:
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother:
Death, ere thou has slain another,
Fair, and learn'd, and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee.¹

Thus William Browne, in one of the Jacobean age's most famous epitaphs, and his praise of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (1561-1621) is echoed by many contemporary poets. For Spenser, she was "Urania, sister unto Astrofell, / In whose brave mynd, as in a golden cofer, / All heavenly gifts and riches locked are"; Samuel Daniel praises her for preserving literature "from those hidious Beastes, oblivion and Barbarisme." Almost a century later, John Aubrey commented that in the Countess' time, "Wilton House was like a College," and the Countess herself "was the greatest Patronesse of witt and learning of any Lady in her time."² Subsequent biographers eulogized her as the age's greatest blue-stocking, but paid token, if polite, attention to her writings.

Our knowledge of her life is based on a relative wealth of documentation unearthed by students of her brother. Mary Sidney was born, in 1561, into a family relatively new to the Tudor governing class, rising in its fortunes but anxious about its past traditions and its all too evident present penury. She spent her childhood in the family homes at Ludlow and Penshurst; while her brother was sent in 1564 to Shrewsbury School, she was tutored at home, acquiring a love for literature, a fluency in English composition, French, Italian, and probably Latin and Greek. In 1575, she joined her mother as one of the ladies-in-waiting in Elizabeth's court. The first public record of her appearance in court occurs in Gascoigne's account of the ceremonial welcome to the Queen and her ladies to Woodstock in 1575 where she was told, in the somewhat laboured words of a welcoming verse:

Ths yonge in yeares, yet olde in wit
A gest dew to your race,
If you hold on as you begine,
Who ist youle not deface?³

The accolades were, fortunately, to increase in poetical merit as she grew older.

By 1575-6, there was talk at court about a marriage between Mary and the middle-aged Henry Earl of Pembroke. Despite some financial embarrassment to Sir Henry Sidney regarding her dowry, the marriage took place on April 22, 1577 and the new Countess of Pembroke henceforth lived at the Herbert family home at Wilton. The Earl was himself a collector of note as well as a patron of drama and literature and no doubt encouraged his young wife to set up what became the most important literary centre outside Elizabeth's court—what Aubrey called the "College" of Wilton. Between 1577 and his death in 1586, Philip Sidney spent long portions of time at Wilton, or at nearby Ivychurch, also part of the Pembroke estates, and it was there that the Countess gathered the poets and men of letters who were to develop and continue Sidney's hopes for Elizabethan literature. From the late 1580s, especially, as the Countess herself took over her dead brother's vocation, Wilton did indeed become like a college or academy: writers such as Greville, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Breton, Fraunce and Watson gathered there. She and her Circle provided the means by which the spirit and influence of the Sidneian revolution in literature were mediated to late Elizabethan and Jacobean literature.

There is little evidence to suggest that the Countess' own writings were commenced before her brother's death: it seems, on the contrary, that the literary experimentations, translations and other writings she completed were directly inspired by his example and dedicated to his memory. In May 1590, she completed her translation of Philippe de Mornay's Discours de la Vie et de la Mort, and about the same time, a translation of Robert Garnier's Marc-Antoine. Both works were first published in 1592. Around 1590, too, she completed the translation of Petrarch's Trionfo della Morte, while the handful of extant lyrics seem also to date from this time. Her major literary achievement was, however, the Psalms, a task she took up from among Sidney's manuscripts and which was largely, though not completely, finished by 1599. As well, she was engaged in presenting adequate editions of Sidney's worksCthe Arcadia appeared in 1593, the Defence in 1595, and a collected edition of his writings, including the corrected text of Astrophel and Stella, in 1598.

Her literary activity grew out of her active interest in patronage. As John Buxton suggests, but for the work of the Countess and her brother the work of many Elizabethan poets would have been rendered negligible.⁴ On his return from his European grand tour in the 1570s, Sidney had looked at the state of English letters and seen that while a vigorous cultural tradition flourished in France, the low Countries and Italy, English literature had seemed to stagnate, and he set about enquiring "why England the Mother of excellent mindes should be growne so hard a stepmother to Poets. … "⁵ The beginnings of his attempts to advance English letters coincide with his sister's marriage, and while it would be foolish to suggest that the family singlehandedly changed the face of Elizabethan literature, without the Sidneys and Wilton House, the literature of the 1580s and 1590s would have been much drabber and less exciting.

The Sidney's patronage operated not primarily through financial support or by providing employment but by means of hospitality and active encouragement. The accolades to the brother and sister constantly emphasize their example and encouragement: they knew, in Nashe's words, "what belonged to" scholars, poets and musicians.⁶ The initial results of the Sidney's efforts were, perhaps, of varying quality. They can be seen in the experiments, from the late 1570s, with quantitative verse, but gradually the movement broadened to include Petrarchist love-poetry, treatises, romances, religious verse, drama. Above all, the Sidneys provided a continuous if informal organization. Although scholars have long doubted the existence of the "aeropagus" Spenser and Harvey seem to refer to in their correspondence of 1579-1580, the idea cannot be entirely dismissed and there is strong, if indirect, evidence for some kind of rudimentary organization. Certainly what John Buxton calls "the endeavour of Sidney and his friends … to remedy the want of desert which they acknowledged in contemporary poetry"⁷ could not have taken place in isolated studies: the obvious parallels amongst the works of, say, Philip and Robert Sidney, Greville, Spenser, Dyer and, later, Spenser, Greville, Breton, Fraunce, Daniel and the Countess herself are too numerous to suggest anything other than close and constant conference and competition.

It is one of the more delightful contributions made by domesticity to English literature that the marriage of Mary Sidney provided such a diverse group with a common bond. In informal and unsystematic ways the Sidneys provided in their family homes for the varied interests of their friends and protégés. Where in Italy or France, Renaissance culture was centered on towns and salons, on Urbino or in Baif's académie, in England "we think not of cities but of houses" and "almost always deep in the country."⁸ There are, indeed, constant references in records and letters to a persistent path between the court and Wilton from 1578 onwards. As James Osborn puts it, Sidney and his Circle set out "to free English poetry from its 'balde Rymers' and succeeded in doing so. The golden phase of Elizabethan poetry grew out of these sessions."⁹

After 1586, it seems the Countess herself took a singularly active part. Contemporary references start to mention her writing, not merely her patronage. Like the ladies Elizabetta Gonzago or Emilia Pia, or Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, the Countess provided inspiration, hospitality and most especially, a working example. She was to Barnabe Barnes the "Great Favourer of Phoebus offspring," and herself one "in whom, even Phoebus is most flourishing!" Nashe writes that the "fayre sister of Phoebus" surpasses even "the Lesbian Sappho with her lirick Harpe."¹⁰ A host of similar tributes can be collected: many poets flourishing in the 1590s wrote in her praiseCand their applause does not just express the commonplace gratitude for favours received but constantly emphasizes the Countess' own literary talents.

In considering the interests that unite the Countess' Circle in the 1580s and 1590s, it is difficult to find any explicit programme for political, religious or even cultural reforms, although in Greville's treatises or Breton's poems, something systematic, almost a political platform, is certainly implied. What unites the Sidney Circle is rather a spirit of a particular kind and interest to students of late Elizabethan culture: what I have elsewhere called, in a series of studies of their works, a "matching of contraries." The Sidneian spirit combines diverse intellectual worlds that separately would seem to fly apart. They were courtiers and so imbued with the fashionable, diverse ideas of courtly philosophers like Castiglione or Guazzo; they had more esoteric philosophical interests in neo-Platonism and Hermetic philosophies. But they were also pious, Calvinistic Christians, and the spirit of the Countess' "little court," to use Breton's phrase, is as much tempered by Calvin as by Castiglione. Breton, in fact, has two lengthy discussions of the atmosphere of Wilton which are especially revealing. In Wits Trenchmour (1597), he writes:

… under heaven it was my greatest happiness … to light into the courtlike house of a right worthy honourable Lady…. Her house beeing in a maner a kinde of little Court, her Lorde in place of no meane command, her person no lesse than worthily and honourablie attended … where first, God daily served, religion trulie preached, all quarrels avoyded, peace carefully preserved, swearing not heard of, where truth was easilie beleeved, a table fully furnished, a house richly garnished, honor kindly entertained, vertue highly esteemed, service well rewarded, and the poore blessedly relieved.

Implied in Breton's praise is, of course, a comparison with the ideal court of Castiglione's Urbino—and in the dedication to the Countess of The Pilgrimage to Paradise (1593), Breton does in fact make the comparison explicit:

Right noble Lady, whose rare vertues, the wise no lesse honour, then the learned admire, and the honest serve … who hath redde of the Duchesse of Urbina, maie saie, the Italians wrote wel: but who knowes the Countesse of Penbrooke, I think hath cause to write better.¹¹

Yet the distinction between Urbino and Wilton is clear, and indeed is typical of the adaptions made by Elizabethan England to the ideal of the court and civil behaviour. The English reading of Castiglione and his followers is, as Daniel Javitch and others have shown, consistently moralized.¹² In the Cortegiano, religion, for instance, is just one subject of polite discourse: theology and personal piety are largely ignored, demanding as they would a singularity of intensity and commitment that would clash with the urbane and gentile refinement of the court. But the Countess of Pembroke's "little court" is constantly praised for its piety and theological learning. In 1623 Walter Sweeper, a conforming but puritanically inclined theologian, dedicated to the Countess' two sons A Briefe Treatise declaring the True Noble-man, and the Base Worldling. After praising the recently deceased Countess, to whom he had hoped to dedicate the work, Sweeper goes on to define the nature of true nobility and courtesy which, he claims, he first learnt at Wilton:

I gained the greatest part of my little learning through my acquaintance with your honorable fathers house and family … your famous Wilton house, like a little Universitie … had in it that learned Phisitian and skilfull Mathematician M. Doctor Moffet … great Hugh Sanford, learned in all arts, sciences, knowledge human and divine…. Never noble house had successively deeper divines. … In this noble House [Bishop] Babington rules of pietie and honestie swayed, swearing was banished; yea the housekeepers and inferiour servants well knew and practised the grounds of Religion.¹³

The remainder of the work is less directly relevant but it goes on to advocate a view of the courtier that is essentially in agreement with Breton's praise of the Countess thirty years earlier Cone based on the Christian life and disdainful of mere earthly honours or titles. Courtliness and piety—Castiglione, we might say, and Calvin. The spirit of the Countess' Circle, and her own writings, is essentially such a matching of contraries.

Wilton's religious tone is reflected in its literary influences. Breton himself wrote religious verse; Fraunce, Lok, Greville, all devotional poets of some skill, were closely linked with Wilton and the "little court." As well, the Wilton Circle reflected more diverse intellectual interests. Along with the strain of piety and theology, it seems to have been deeply interested in that rich and suggestive variety of speculative thought that starts to attract, irritate and inspire English writers in the late 1580s and 1590s. A significant date is the visit of Giordano Bruno to England in 1583-85. Bruno was in close contact with Sidney, Greville, Gwinne, and FlorioCand there are distinct signs of his influence upon these and other writers of the same generation, including Spenser, Fraunce, Daniel, Donne and Shakespeare. The confrontation between Bruno's emphasis on man's imaginative autonomy, his belief in the radical freedom of the will and the Protestant emphasis upon man's limitations and sinfulness, is a point of intellectual tension that proved to be fundamentally creative in the literature of the time. What appear to be intellectual contraries may become, in the zodiac of the poet's wit, a thing of strange beauty. The tension is summed up by a passage in Sidney's Defence, where he isolated each element in a phrase—on the one hand, man's "erected wit," on the other, his "infected wil."¹⁴ In the Countess' writing, the same tension can be seen in the very scope of her writings—the religious drive in her Psalms and the translation of de Mornay; the courtly-romantic strain in the Petrarch; the fusing of courtliness and piety in the elegy on her brother, her pastoral dialogue and her poem to the Queen, and the mixture of romantic idealization and moralization in her portrayal of Cleopatra in Antonie.

The Countess' writing career seems to have been confined largely to the years between her brother's death in 1586 and that of her husband in 1601. Some of her writings may have perished in a fire at Wilton of 1648 that destroyed, among other things, many of the family papers, but the Countess seems to have retired very much from the public arena in the last twenty years of her life. She died, after an attack of the smallpox, in 1621, and was buried in the family grave in Salisbury Cathedral where, today, a plaque bearing the text of Browne's epitaph commemorates her.

The literary career of the Countess seems almost certainly to have been confined to the period 1586-1611. A list of her extant writings, with approximate dates, is as follows:

c. 1586     Psalms commenced.

c. 1588     "The Dolefull Lay of Chlorinda."

1590     A Discourse of Life and Death (published 1592, reprinted 1595, 1600, 1607).

1592     Antonie published (reprinted 1595).

1593     Edited The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia.

c. 1593     The Triumph of Death.

1595     The Defence of Poesie published by Ponsonby.

1598     Edited Astrophel and Stella; the authorized edition of Sidney's works issued.

1599     Poems of dedication to Sidney and the Queen.

1599     Presentation Copy of Psalms prepared for the Queen.

c. 1599     "A Pastorali Dialogue betweene two Shepherds."

c. 1611     Probable terminal date of final extant revisions to the Psalms (MSS G M: Trinity College, Cambridge G.3.16 and the Huntington Library HM. 117)….

The Triumph of Death

The Countess' translation of the Trionfo is found in the Petyt MSS in the Library of the Inner Temple. One of the manuscripts (538.43.1) contains an interesting miscellany including a letter from Sir John Harington to Lucy Countess of Bedford, which praises Mary Sidney as "in Poesie the mirroir of our Age," and alludes to three of her Psalms which he copied out and sent to the Countess of Bedford. In the same collection, in the same scribal hand, is the Triumph of Death, ascribed in both the title and at the poem's end to the Countess of Pembroke. It is obviously the poem referred to by Thomas Churchyard in Wits Conceit (1593) and Thomas Moffat's The Silkewormes and Other Flies (1599), where similar allusions are made to the Countess' translating Petrarch. It lay unpublished until 1912 when Frances Berkeley Young printed it in two formsCas appendix to her biography of the Countess, and as an article in PMLA. The work has been increasingly discussed by scholars, who have invariably quoted from one or the other of these printings; however, nobody, it would seem, either compared Young's two versions or checked them against the original. In fact, the version in her book excludes, without comment, lines 118-141 of chapter One of the text; the version in PMLA restores these missing lines, but includes many minor errors and a number of quite serious major errors of transcription Call within 363 lines of verse. The present edition is offered as the first full and accurate text of the Countess' poem, and is printed by the kind permission of the Masters of the Bench of the Inner Temple.

Petrarch's Trionfi was probably the most influential poem of the Renaissance. Written during Petrarch's period of exile in the 1340s and 1350s, it was first published in 1470. Thereafter the work went into numerous editions, either singly or as part of collected editions of Petrarch's Rime. Building upon the precedents of Dante (in the Purgatorio XXIX) and Boccaccio (the Amora Visione), Petrarch's work is a series of dream visions portraying the successive triumphs of Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time and Eternity. The Trionfo della Morte itself describes a vision in which the poet meets a group of ladies who have witnessed the death of Laura which is then movingly evoked. The second capitolo of the work consists of a moving depiction of Laura who confesses her long, faithful but only now acknowledged love for the poet.

The work seems to have been widely read and highly regarded in sixteenth-century England. Ascham, among others, commented on its greatness, even bewailing that Englishmen revered the Trionfi above Genesis. It was first translated in the 1540s, by Henry Parker, Lord Morley, in a laboured, wordy and metrically erratic version published in 1554; a second complete translation, even more clumsy, was made by William Fowler in 1587-88. Different parts of the work were translated by various court poets, including Queen Elizabeth; Mary Sidney may have completed more than the one Trionfo extant, but there is no evidence for her having done so.

While, as Robert Coogan comments, all Elizabethan readers would have enjoyed the poem's idealization of the chaste yet passionate love between Laura and the poet,¹⁵ nevertheless the subject of this particular Trionfo must have appealed in a peculiarly personal way to the Countess. The work reflects, we might fairly speculate, her own deeply idealized love for her brother, the impossibility of its sexual consummation and the realization that his inspiration of her own writing could be the only real and lasting fruit of her love. If the Countess did translate only the one part of the poem, her choice is especially significant.

It is difficult to pin down the exact text the Countess would have used among the many editions of Petrarch's work which were available in England by the late sixteenth century. Morley's translation was probably based on the text published in Venice in 1544, Il Petrarca con l'espositione di Alessandrio Vellutello. In preparing this edition, I have consulted this and a number of standard Renaissance and modern texts of Petrarch's work.

The most outstanding feature of the Countess' translation is the way she reproduces the original's stanzaic pattern. Petrarch's poem is in terza rima, where the middle line of one stanza rhymes with the outer lines of the next tercet: aba, bcb, cdc, etc. Here each terzina is rendered by an English equivalent and yet an admirable idiomatic fluency is maintained. The 11-syllable line is compressed into English iambic decasyllables and she demonstrates an acute ear for the movement and tone of both the English poetical line and that of her original and a consistent grasp of the high emotional level of Petrarch's poem. Her version is also remarkably succinct. By contrast with Morley's, which clumsily expands the original by half its length again, her version is never wordy, and usually vastly superior poetically. She certainly seems to have known Morley's version for there are occasions when she is misled by his translation into omitting a phrase. Where Petrarch reads "Le belle donne intorno al casto letto / Triste diceano …" and Morley has " … sayde they that were present there …" the Countess of Pembroke's version reads " … in mourneful plight / the Ladies saide" (I. 147-148).¹⁶ Actual errors of translation, however, occur infrequently: she does not see "altri so che n'avrà più di me doglia" refers to Petrarch himself and so renders the line "this charge of woe on others will recoyle" (I. 52) and she misreads "avei" in 11.128-129:

Questo mi taccio; pur quel dolce nodo
Mi piacque assai ch'ntomo al cor avei;

I saie not, now, of this, right faine I am,
Those cheines that tyde my eart well lyked me.

Where Petrarch writes that Death is fierce and relentless only to the deaf and blind—

the Countess attributes, though not perhaps inappropriately, the deafness and blindness to Death itself:

Similarly, Petrarch speaks of Laura as being without a peer, "che fu nel mondo una," which is translated by the rather flat "who in the world was one" (I.51). Where the poem depicts the poet trying to escape the fact of his aging, the Countess evidently misunderstands and reverses the meaning, rendering "e debito all' etate" as "to my yeares was due" (I.139).

However, unlike Morley, the Countess is generally true to both word and spirit. Where Petrarch celebrates the glorious array of Laura's attendants, Morley's version is much more pedestrian:

Similarly much more moving is the Countess' rendition of Petrarch's evocation of Death's ruthlessness in saying the "cose eccelse":

Besides the Countess' version, Morley's rhetoric is empty and trite.

At the poem's great moments of idealized passion and elevated suffering, the Countess is especially impressive. The opening, with its delicate light vowels and stately movement is typical of her interpretation of the poem as a courtly pilgrimage, an allegorical revelation of the power of passion before the threat of death:

The last terzina here is notable for the way the Countess brings a refreshing specificness to what in Petrarch's original is a mere generic term:

Non con altr'arme che col cor pudico,
E d'un bel viso e de' pensieri schivi
D'un parlar saggio e d'onestate amico.

The grim description of Death, "stealing on with unexpected wound," the praise of Laura, her voice "repleate with Angell-lyke delight," (I.44, 150) and the sombre, formal tone of the conclusion all stand out as superbly evoked, in image and tone, the more remarkable because of the tightness of form. Where the Countess does expand images or phrases, she consistently makes her original more concrete. "In Petrarch's original," it has been suggested in, perhaps, something of an overstatement, "despite its eloquence and nobility, one feels at times that the language is a little vague, a little stylized. The poetic tool seems to have become a shade worn and blunted. Lady Pembroke seems to refurbish it and give it a new edge…. "¹⁷ She certainly uses vigorously active verbs and constantly ringing epithets: "con onor" becomes "a ioyefull conqueresse" (I.4), "non con altr' arme" is expanded to "not with sword, with spear or bow" (I.7). The emotions evoked are strong and passionate, and the poem's style is appropriately elevated and energetic. If we contrast the Countess' poem with the original, an immediate difference in tone is striking. A more dynamic opposition is set up between Laura and Death in the Countess' version. Petrarch subordinates his characters to the abstractions which they represent, giving them little dialogue—even Laura is "not so much a woman as the essence of virtuous love," while, as R. N. Watkins puts it, Petrarch himself "appears as an interested but not as an interesting spectator; he sees and applauds, he hardly moves, inquires, or responds."¹⁸ By contrast, the dramatic nature of the encounter between the poet and the spirit of his dead mistress is stressed by the Countess. The tone is modulated carefully throughout: Petrarch in the first chapter is quiet and sorrowful, narrating the events, resignedly anticipating his own death. Laura's attitude to Death has the serenity of transcendence, accepting Death's homage to her uniqueness, but willing to undergo the penalty of her mortality. In chapter Two, however, the tone changes. As Petrarch encounters Laura in his dream, the poem becomes a dialogue between lovers, the tone more dramatic and less expository. Laura becomes a complex composite figure—the religious ideal, certainly, but as well what by the late sixteenth century had developed into the familiar Petrarchan mistress of love-poetry. Laura's brightness threatens that of the sun, eclipsing the darkness of Death—both are familiar compliments to the Petrarchan mistress. The second chapter rises to an impressive culmination in Laura's farewell to the poet (II. 184-190)—a parting which, it might be speculated, echoed something of the Countess' own feelings for her brother, a subject which will be touched on in discussing the poems she wrote in his memory:

Ladie (quoth I) your words most sweetlie kinde
Have easie made, what euer erst I bare,
But what is left of yow to liue behinde.
Therefore to know this, my onelie care,
If sloe or swift shall com our meeting-daye.
She parting saide, As my coniectures are,
Thow without me long time on earth shalt staie
(II. 184-190)

"The Triumph of Death" is by the highest poetical standards, a remarkable piece of work. It makes its readers wish that the Countess of Pembroke had not, seemingly, obeyed Moffat's petition to let Petrarch rest—although, perhaps a little wistfully one observes that the probable lapse of time between her finishing the work (c. 1593) and his remark (1599) might suggest that she did in fact complete more of the Trionfi. No trace of any other Triumphs has survived—indeed it is only because someone, presumably Harington, happened to have had the work copied, that it survived at all. It stands as one of her most successful productions with its rhythmical subtlety, concrete evocation and technical mastery not merely adding up to a fine translation but to a remarkable literary achievement.

The Psalms

It was not until the 1960s that a reasonably accurate account of the historical and intrinsic importance of the Countess of Pembroke's psalms was made. In 1962, William A. Ringler Jr. published an account of the fourteen then-known manuscripts of the Sidney Psalms; in 1963 J. C. A. Rathmell published an edition of the Psalms from one of the manuscripts, that at Penshurst Place. Since then, fifteenth and sixteenth manuscripts have been located, and research on textual and literary matters has been carried out by a number of scholars. In what follows, I offer a summary of the present state of our understanding of the text of the Sidney Psalms, and some brief indications of their literary importance, focussing on those psalms here printed for the first time….

Except for Manuscript B, a transcript made by Bishop Samuel Woodford in 1694-95, all the … manuscripts date from c. 1595-1630. They exist in a clearly defined relationship, which is almost unique in the Elizabethan canon for its fullness and clarity, and for the amount of information revealed or implied about the poet's habits of composition. Many of the manuscript variants are not simply scribal inaccuracies but represent distinct phases of authorial revision. The Countess was, as Ringler put it, in a term we should qualify somewhat, "an inveterate tinkerer"¹⁹ with her text. In preparing his edition of Sidney's 43 psalms, Ringler was concerned with restoring Sidney's original revision and so removed the Countess' later revisions. Rathmell, on the other hand, aimed to print an emended version of Manuscript A, the Penshurst text, and so was concerned with what he presented as the Countess' final revisions—although, as I shall show, certain of the manuscript variants do in fact somewhat call in doubt the finality of the versions in A. Certainly, between Sidney's versions and the Countess' latest revisions lie a great many variants and independent or parallel versions, all making up a rich and fascinating story of nothing less than the growth of the Countess of Pembroke's literary vocation and poetical skills. The printing of the Psalms in this edition will help to make this process clear.

A full collation of the 16 manuscripts shows that there are three distinct kinds of variant—scribal errors and alterations, and both minor and major authorial variants. Collation also reveals, as both Rathmell and Ringler showed, that the Countess had two working copies, one presumably at Wilton, the other probably at the family's London residence, Baynard's Castle. The London copy seems to have contained independent revisions which were occasionally transferred back to the original at Wilton. The London copy is also the source of manuscripts containing still further independent versions: it would be in London where the Psalms would naturally find an audience outside the Countess' immediate Circle at Wilton and where requests for copies would be most numerous. Most of the extant manuscripts are therefore derived from the London copy.

The two working copies will, following Rathmell's sigla, be designated as B^0-1-2 (from which at a late stage of revision [B²] was derived A, B, J, and part of F), and X, which was itself derived from an earlier stage of revision in B (B¹). As initially reconstructed by Rathmell, B¹ first gave rise, through a conjectural copy Z, to K and through another conjectural intermediary, Y, to F (Psalms 1-26) and I. Another line of descent goes from Z to the London working copy X. From X is derived a set of closely related manuscripts C D Gl E H L G M, sometimes through conjectural intermediaries.

Rathmell used A, the Penshurst text, as his copy-text, and together with J, it is the most important source for establishing the Countess' final versions of most of his Psalms. However, the most important manuscripts for the purpose of the present edition are B and the two closely related manuscripts G and M. B, Ringler's copy-text, is undoubtedly the most perplexing of all the extent manuscripts. It was copied by Woodford from a manuscript, which must have been a late stage of the Countess' revision of Sidney's original text. It had probably been sold, like A and the other books and manuscripts at Wilton, by the fifth Earl. It was transcribed with some 200 errors and rather modernized spelling and punctuation in 1694-95. The original, as is revealed by the corrections to A, must have been much written over by interlineations, strike-outs and marginal additions. These consisted of successive layers of the Countess' revisions, especially a number of early versions which were later abandoned ("expung'd" is Woodford's constant remark) and many minor revisions. Many of the later versions seemed to have been inserted into his copy-text on loose sheets and were lost by the time he made his transcription. Woodford selected what seemed to be the Countess' final intentions and, as well, noted the rejected readings. He copied his original with reasonable care, but could have saved himself and later editors a great deal of labor if instead of undertaking his "tiresome task of transcribing"²⁰ the original, he had merely folded it up and preserved it. In its unrevised state, his copy-text was clearly the Countess' text inherited by the Countess from her brother, much worked over, at a stage before her then-final 1599 revisions were made.

Associated with B, and used by Ringler to collaborate some of its readings, is K. It was, as Ringler showed, derived from the Countess' Wilton manuscript before the London working-copy was established. But as well, it records a number of important readings not found in B that were evidently added by the Countess herself to K; these were afterwards transmitted to X and a number of the manuscripts derived from it. Through scribal corruption and the occasional authorial intervention, many were progressively lost, but tracing the process of their transmission and disappearance helps us to show precisely the order in which the manuscripts in X were copied. Many of K's variants are recorded in Gl, for instance, and are gradually lost through the series of intermediaries which gave rise to L, E, and H.

Manuscript G, now at Trinity College, Cambridge, was prepared for publication in the mid-seventeenth century, and for the student of the Countess' Psalms along with the close-related manuscript M is certainly the most important of the manuscripts in X. It contains unique endings to Psalms 25, 31, and 42, rhymed versions of Psalms 120 to 127, against versions in quantitative meters in all other manuscripts except M, now in the Huntington Library. For reasons I shall advance below, these and other minor variants suggest that these manuscripts, or at least the common intermediary between them and X (Rathmell's conjectural manuscript S) have some claims to containing the very last revisions prepared by the CountessCafter the completion of A, which was made for presentation to the Queen in 1599, and possibly as late as 1611 as there are occasions when the Countess appears to be guided by the King James version of the Bible in her revisions.

The revisions recorded in B represent the Countess' early experiments, the hesitant products of a writer feeling her way. Sidney probably, left the Countess a fairly clean copy of his first 43 Psalms. In the stemma above, B⁰ represents the text as Sidney left it; it survives only through Woodford's transcript, and was probably a scribal copy rather than a holograph since some of the typical Sidneian spellings occasionally show through.

When B and the manuscripts derived from B¹ and B² are examined to ascertain the Countess' method of working, however, an important difference presents itself. The manuscripts reveal a process of constant alteration and experimentation which adds up to nothing less than a poet's self-education. The Countess' very inexperience as a poet, her initial relatively unsophisticated handling of poetic form, make the relationship between her psalms and her originals less predictable and thus, in a sense, more open to development. Eventually, as she grows in confidence and competence, her versions are frequently deliberately more independent than her brother's. Where Sidney shows a workmanlike facility to keep to the logical and metaphorical structure of his original, the Countess' Psalms never maintain a constant distance from her text. She continues in her brother's footsteps in her fertility of technical experimentation, but she takes various paths away from strict translation, and develops a poetic voice very different from his—at times narrower but, usually, more intense, certainly more formally inventive, and more adept at extending the metaphorical structure of the psalm or re-creating the original into surprising Elizabethan life. To study the Countess' revisions is to be given a fascinating if often conjectural insight into the way this earnest, dedicated Elizabethan lady realized and cultivated her poetic talents. Her rewritings of her brother's psalms suggest that she used them initially as the basis for her own poetic experiments, feeling her way amongst his varied metrical patterns, and gradually developing a style and tone of her own.

To support these assertions, I shall now turn to the manuscripts themselves. The disappearance of the original of Woodford's copy is, of course, the most frustrating factor in the reconstruction of the manuscript revisions. Woodford noted that "the Originall Copy is by me Given me by my Brother Mr. John Woodford who bought it among other broken books to putt up Coffee pouder…. " Dr. Bent Juel-Jensen, the owner of J, suggests that the original was still in existence in the possession of the Woodford family some 30 years ago, and although it has never been turned up in the family papers, there are hopes that it might have survived. Nevertheless, by means of B—after collating the other manuscripts to trace Woodford's emendations and errors—we can trace the sequence of the Countess' revisions through A, K, and the manuscripts in X. It seems that the Countess permitted copies to be made, usually from her London working-copy; sometimes she supplied quite new versions for these transcripts, made for friends, court acquaintances and admirers such as Harington. The reliability of these manuscripts varies: G1 E H L N are, for instance, more affected by scribal corruption than C D O G M, partly reflecting the number of intermediaries involved in the line of transmission.

Sidney presumably left his manuscript of the Psalms, the original of the Countess' Wilton working-copy, with her. She seems to have mulled over her brother's manuscript, altering his text not merely from perversity but through a constant desire to practice the rudiments of verse construction and, eventually, to bring what was obviously an unfinished manuscript entrusted to her to a stage of fuller completion. She was, for instance, obviously dissatisfied with Sidney's awkward phrasing at certain points, and removes the irregular stanzas at the conclusion of seven of his psalms. Thus she alters Sidney's aberrant 6-line concluding stanza to Psalm 31 as follows:

This version was transcribed as her then final thoughts in the 1599 presentation volume, and is preserved in A J F. Some time later, however, when she was still engaged in supervising transcriptions from the London text, the Countess obviously felt that the compression was too extreme. She restored the first part of Sidney's original conclusion, and then made two closely related versions of the final lines which are preserved in G and M, which are probably the latest authorially supervised transcriptions to be made.

It would seem probable that she continued to revise in this way even after having completed the bulk of her work on the psalms, since certain of the revisions in X appear to have been made later than when A reached its final state. Thus Sidney's conclusion to Psalm 42 is left unchanged in A B F J and K, versions derived from the Wilton text, and they also appear in O and D, which were perhaps among the earliest manuscripts transcribed from X, the London working-copy. Four subsequent revisions of the lines, however, then appear in X—one in C, one shared by E H L N, and others in G and M. Unquestionably, the enormous number of revisions which the Countess made to her brother's text, largely although not fully recorded by Ringler in his edition, betray a mind unable to leave the text alone, but more importantly they also show the Countess feeling for the appropriate form, the exact word, measuring the way sentiment attaches to or contrasts with rhythmical and metrical expectation. The degree to which, first, the Countess had to struggle with poetic composition, and, second, the extent to which her verse matured, is clearly seen when her own early versions are considered. The occasional over-regularity, the tentative probings for greater intellectual definiteness—indeed all the revisions she constantly imposed on her brother's text—must have increasingly given her confidence as she commenced her own independent translations. What were something probably close to her first versions of the remaining 107 psalms were recorded in Woodford's original, and his transcription, once it has been purged of his errors and alterations, is most valuable in tracing her development in poetical competence. B records (and I print below) early versions of 22 Psalms: 44, 46, 50, 53, 58, 60, 62, 63, 64, 68, 69, 70, 71, 75, 80, 85, 86, 105, 108, 117, 199ghsw, and 122. As well, where Woodford's copy-text included both the early and revised versions (evidently on loose leaves), he marginally noted the readings of many early drafts. Psalm 49 is amended in virtually every line and so for the purpose of this edition, its original version has been assembled from B and printed (Psalms 61, 72, 110 and 118 are also heavily revised, but not so extensively as to virtually constitute a version substantively different from that in A). Woodford made a number of speculative remarks to account for the Countess' dissatisfaction with her first attempts. Thus he writes on Psalm 46: "I suppose this Psalm may be crosst because of the conclusion or last staffes not answering the rest being shorter by four verses as in the former Psalms above, which are therefore corrected." At 48. 9-10, he writes "the two last verses are putt in the margin instead of these expunged," and then adds a revision from the manuscripts in X:

Ev'ry pallace yt enfouldeth
God for surest refuge howldeth
(48 C.9-10)

From such variants we can, incidentally, learn something further about Woodford's copy-text. Because he included in the main body of his text some revisions found elsewhere only in X and not in I or K, his original was presumably still being worked on at the same time as X, the Countess' London copy. There seem to have been when she chose to transfer fairly minute particulars from one copy to the other, a surmise born out by similar evidence elsewhere. That Woodford does not, however, include all the variants in X suggests again that the Countess revised particular transcripts made from the London copy on an individual, rather random basis and did not transfer all such variants.

The high number of heavily revised versions among the first third of the Countess' psalms (16 heavily revised or abandoned versions in the first 36) might suggest what would be logical, that she started where her brother left off. Certainly, the first version of 44 is very different from the later one. But some of the early psalms were barely or hardly revised: 51 (A) one of the best in the collection, is a magnificently controlled poem, displaying a sophisticated handling of technique and tone that is vastly superior to the early versions of 50, the psalm before. There exists no early version of 51, which might suggest that the Countess at first, at least, adopted a quite random order of proceeding. Psalms 46 and 61 in MS B are also probably among the earliest attempts by the Countess since they show the "imperfect" endings favored by Sidney which she later revised.

From those Psalms with early versions recorded in B, we do get a fascinating insight into the Countess' methods of poetic composition. 50, for instance, is a psalm where relatively minor changes only were made to B¹; the variants Woodford records amount to a first sketch competent enough to build upon rather than a distinct early, later abandoned, version. 50 (B) is a relatively clumsily constructed draft in 12-line stanzas, with an irregular rhyme scheme which looks as if it might eventually have developed into double sixains, rhyming aabbc ddeec. 50 (A) by contrast is a tightly constructed poem in an 8-line tetrameter stanzas rhyming ababcdcd. It is also a finely wrought piece, with the opening theophany evoked in strongly dramatic terms:

The balanced phrases, the repetition in 11.4-5, and the sonorous dramatic note make the opening stanza reminiscent of a herald's formal announcement of a monarch's decree. By contrast, 50 (B) stumbles weakly, and is barely held together; the comparison shows how in working over her material the Countess, did, however, see exactly where she needed to improve the opening:

The contrast is a revealing one. The diction has been heightened where appropriate and made more concrete and there has been a dramatic syntactical tightening. The flaccid monosyllables of 11.3-4 in the earlier draft are replaced by the clashing climaxes of the final version. The weak attempt at philosophical underlining of line 7 ("God comes, becomes and will not silent stay") emerges as a dramatic metaphor of urgency—A God comes, he comes, with eare and tongue restor'd"—and the summoning of the Earth and Heavens is similarly rendered more dramatically and urgently, by compressing and breaking up the lines.

Other revisions show a similar sureness of touch. The original version of the Psalm's verse 12 (50 A.25-28) has none of the revisions' vigorous movement and finely wrought scorn which in the early draft is mere petulence:

If I hungry that I hungry were
Since earth is mine, and all that earth doth beare
I would not tell it thee to begg thy meate
(50 B.31-33)

Similarly, the energetic conclusion of the later poem with its especially fine note of threat—

in vaine to others for release you flie,
if once on you I griping fingers sett
(A. 59-60)

is only a hint in the original:

Mark this I say, least if with griping hand
I once lay hold of you, none may withstand
My matchlesse might, nor loose the pinching hand …
(B. 63-65)

The value of Woodford's transcription is clearly seen in such poems: 50 (B) is an early draft worked over by an apprentice poetic mind groping for the desired tone and image, but sufficiently promising to be used as the basis for later versions. So the Countess' final achievements can be better realized when we see the mechanics of the process of revision so clearly revealed.

The difference in quality seen in the two closely related versions of 50 is also observable in Psalm 44. B's version is in 12 8-line stanzas, well constructed, the advanced stage of competence suggesting that the Countess' habit was to give early attention to stanzaic and metrical form. Each stanza is carefully shaped into a pattern of 76968687 syllables, mainly in pentameters and using a high proportion of feminine rhyme. In the revised version, however, she tightens the rhyme scheme to ababbcbc, making a more succinct and rounded form. Particular details are, as well, constantly changed. The opening lines are reworked with a simpler diction and a more dramatic movement. B reads:

The revision rewords the lines thus, breaking up the monotonous movement and simplifying the diction:

Similarly, the contrast between the pagans and the Lord's chosen at the end of the opening stanza is made more emphatic and clear. Early in her work on the psalm the Countess saw the force of extending the original verse's barely hinted metaphor of planting and growth, and B reads:

The revision irons out the confused syntax, compresses the clumsy wordiness, and reinforces the metaphor:

A process of constant tightening and variation can be seen throughout: the flaccid "Their sword did not procure them/ Possession of the land" (B.9-10) becomes "Never could their sword procure them / Conquest of the promisi land" (A.9-10); by constantly shifting the caesura, tightening the rhymes and making the vocabulary more concrete and specific, the poem becomes more dramatic and taut. The original opening quatrain of each stanza, rhymed abac, gains much more force becoming abab as in the fine sixth stanza:

By comparison with the original, this stanza has an impressive force, achieving the carefully worked for simplicity that becomes the characteristic mark of the Countess' mature style. The final lines in particular have been consciously shaped for greater clarity and force:

Another psalm where B shows how the original can be viewed as a first draft rather than an independent version is 69. The final poem is a magnificently evoked and sustained cry of anguish, with an especially fine opening stanza:

Through the brooding movement of the opening, the almost surrealistic, and original, image of the "whirling hoale," and the mounting cry of the last 4 lines, the poem opens with an impressive evocation of fear. The earlier version contains the possibilities of this achievement, although it is much clumsier:

The process of revision is fairly clear. The number of syllables has been reduced, the diction sharpened; line 4 has been entirely reworked, and the overall tension greatly increased. The most consistent revisions seem to have been toward simplification of vocabulary. The opening of the third stanza in B reads:

O mighty Lord, let not discountnanct be
By my occasion such as trust in thee
(69 B.17-18)

Reducing the line length, simplifying the vocabulary makes the final version much more effective:

Mighty Lord, lett not my case
blank the rest that hope on thee
(69 A.17-18)

Examples could be multiplied throughout the poem.

Psalms 44 and 69 are examples where the original is close enough to the final version to be regarded merely as a first draft. The Countess obviously saw the possibilities inherent in her first attempts, and used them as the basis of later more competent versions. With other psalms, the resemblances are much more distant. In these cases, the versions in B indicate that the Countess made virtually new starts. 46 B, for instance, has relatively few points where any close relationship can be traced except through the common original. It is clearly a draft that was largely abandoned because of its sheer inadequacy as a poem. It certainly reads like a poet's typical early experiment, with an incomplete final stanza, a number of very clumsy rhymes, and much verbal padding:

The revised version not only shows a much less singsong movement and a tighter rhyme scheme; it is entirely more personal and dramatic:

There are some lines where the Countess obviously used material from her early version, but it is fairly clear that in this case, she recognized the general ineptitude of her first draft and started entirely anew. Similarly, with Psalm 58, the Countess used a quite different stanza form in revision, and as well as constantly generally strengthened the concreteness and simplicity of the diction, reducing the poem's length by almost a third.

Many of the early versions recorded in B are therefore valuable for tracing the development of the Countess' poetic maturation, although there are occasional early lines or stanzas which are superior to their later equivalents. In general, however, there is a marked technical maturity: tighter stanzaic patterns (as in 60), a greater sense of meditative depth (as in 63), and above all a cultivated and muscular simplicity, and a firmer sense of metaphor (as in 80, A. 16-32; cf. 80, B.29-56) Woodford's transcription, even with his original tantalizingly missing, is a document of first rate importance in understanding the Countess' psalms.

So far as the other MSS are concerned, K contains a large number of small authorial revisions, some of which it shares with the manuscripts in X, suggesting that it reflects changes made at a relatively early stage and retained in the London text. It includes the original versions, found also in B and the manuscripts in X, of 119ghsw, a version of 75 found also only in B I N, and as well a number of distinct variants, some shared with C, D, N or Gl. I corroborates many of B's early versions and preserves a version of 89 which almost certainly would have been found in B had Woodford's copy-text not been damaged. It also includes a unique version of Psalm 113, "you that the life of servants doe professe," in 20 eleven-syllable lines in couplets, employing a high proportion (60%) of feminine rhymes. Despite a great deal of textual corruption, I is therefore an especially interesting MS for reconstructing the Countess' writing habits.

Among the most interesting versions the Countess made in X is the sequence of Psalms 120-127, recorded in G and M, and printed below. It seems that if A records the Countess' apparently final versions of the psalms, these and probably some of the other unique variants in G and M are exceptions, and were composed later. In the 1599 copy, Psalms 120-127 are in quantitative metres, and an early version of Psalm 122, preserved in B I G1 E H L, is also a quantitative experiment. Similarly, 89 I is another such experiment and, indeed, one of the age's finest attempts at employing classical versification in English. But Psalms 120-127 in G M are in rhymed verse, suggesting that the Countess eventually saw the folly of these neo-classical experiments. A J F B I K O D N G1 C E H L N preserve the quantitative versions; only G and M have the rhymed versions. By the end of the century, most Elizabethan poets had abandoned the quantitative experiment. Daniel's Defence of Rhyme, dedicated to the Countess' elder son, William the third Earl, was published in 1603, and it is possible that the Countess herself was aware of his arguments. As well, there are echoes of the King James version, as in the opening of Psalm 122. The wording here is slightly different from that of the Geneva version and may suggest that these versions of Psalms 120-127 were written after the Countess had read the new Authorized version.²¹ G and M have, therefore, on these grounds, some claim to representing the Countess' final thoughts, at least in Psalms 120-127.

The Psalms as Poetry

Even in the Countess' early experiments, we can see something of the struggle which eventually produced the best collection of post-Reformation religious verse in English before Herbert's The Temple. In the first place, as a participant in the technical revolution initiated by her brother, the Countess was clearly determined that the Psalms should be translated into an appropriate variety of metrical and stanzaic forms. In her complete collection, and not counting Sidney's original 43 psalms or psalms to which she made only minor revisions, there are 164 distinct stanzaic patterns, with only one repeated (122 G M, 126 G M), and 94 quite distinct metrical patterns. As well, the choice of a particular stanzaic form often determined that the Countess' version moved significantly away from her original. One instance is the acrostic Psalm 117, where the manuscripts reveal something of the habits of thought that went into the poem's making. The first draft, recorded in B, shows how she devised her initial letters to form the words PRAIS THE LORD, and then wrestled with the rest of the lines, arriving first at a rough rhyme-scheme of abcbaccdcedf and the mere draft of a poem:

Praise, prayse the Lord, All that of lowest sphere
Reside on any side
All you I say
In countrys scattered wide
Se in your joyes Jehovas prayse appeare
That worthily your songs display
His worth whose every way
Exceeding grace
Layd upon us doth overlay

Our greatest force; whose promise ever true
Restrained within no space
Decayes not, he needs it not renew.
(117 B)

From such rough beginnings, the Countess realized the essence of an acrostic poem—neatness of execution and pithiness of statement, with the meaning reflecting the formal patterning. In her subsequent revision, she reduced the length of line, worked out an appropriately brief utterance and a simple rhyme-scheme of ababcdcdefef:

Praise him that ay
remaines the same:
all tongues display
Jehovas fame,
sing all that share
this earthly ball:
his mercies are
expos'd to all.
Like as the word
once he doth give,
rold in record,
doth tyme outlyve.
(117 A)

Comparing her final version with the Biblical original, it is very difficult to find any connection except in the most general sense: both are hymns of praise, but there is no more specific relationship.

Ten of the Countess' psalms (120-127 A, 89 I K, 122 B I G1 E H L) were written in quantitative metres. They are part of a widespread Elizabethan attempt to adapt classical forms to the vernacular, and in composing these psalms the Countess seems to have been guided by her brother's practice of bringing the rhythmical regularity as close as possible to native stresses. Two of her poems are modelled upon poems from the Arcadia (121 A on O A 33, and 122 B I G1 E H L on O A 34). Psalm 120 A, in asclepiads, combines the regular pattern of O A 32 with the irregular stressing typical of classical models….

It is, however, written in alcaic stanzas, and thus has three contrasting types of line, which lends a degree of variety to the poem. 121 is in phaleuciacs…; both versions of 122 in asclepiads; 123, elegaic pentameters starting with short stressed syllables and ending with disyllables. 124 is in iambics, although the Countess typically varies the stress to bring the poem's movement closer to vernacular rhythms. 125 is in sapphics; 126, as Woodford, who scanned it incorrectly, was perhaps aware, in somewhat irregular asclepiads, achieving greater poetic flexibility at the expense of strict regularity. 126 I is in the same metre. Of all the quantitative poems, 89 I, in hexameters, is the most successful, combining quantitative strictness with rhythmical intensity, using a high proportion of accentual spondees to create appropriately strong rhythms. It has some especially fine passages evoking God's majesty—for instance the almost Miltonic description of the angel's humbling themselves before God:

Who can among th' exalted train of glorious angells
Like to Iehoua be found? All him, with an awfull obeisance
Terrible acknowledge, of flock affrighted about him—
Thow, commander of hosts, indeed most mighty Iehoua,
Seest not a match in powr…
(16-20)

Unusually for such a long poem, the Countess keeps up the appropriate tone of ringing exaltation—and while in general her quantitative experiments are earnest failures, 89 I K is "the most successful Elizabethan attempt to naturalize the hexameter,"²² and certainly is comparable in quality with Fraunce's poems.

The relevance of the quantitative poems to a discussion of the Countess' poetic independence is primarily in the demands made on her translation by the strict regularity of the form. Something of the way she worked can be grasped by comparing the rhymed versions of 120-127 recorded in Manuscripts G and M. Psalm 125 G M stays close to the original in its imagery, stanzas two and three, for instance:

The imagery is closely based on the original, the versification competent if rather ordinary. The version in sapphics, by contrast, makes certain formal demands upon the Countess so that she is forced to move significantly away from the Psalm's original metaphors. The result is a far more autonomous poetic structure:

As Salem braveth with her hilly bullwarkes
roundly enforted: soe the great Jehova
closeth his servantes, as a hilly bulwark ever abiding;
Though Tirantes hard yoke with a heavy pressure
wring just the shoulders: but a while it holdeth
lest the best minded by too hard abusing bend to abuses.

The Countess' technical virtuosity is, then, important and remarkable for her time; with few models, certainly in English, she extends the technical range of English versification, and may well have contributed to the formal revolution popularly associated with Donne and Herbert over the next 40 years or so. As Rathmell observes, in her Psalms we can see how the Countess "meditated on the text before her, and the force of her version derives from her sense of personal involvement … it is her capacity to appreciate the underlying meaning that vivifies her poems."²³ Usually, if not exclusively, it is the "underlying meaning" that the Countess is concerned to evoke in her Psalms.

The spirit in which she approached the Psalms is clearly revealed by the many changes she made as she developed her poetical skills in successive manuscript revisions. Even in the earliest versions, those recorded in the Woodford manuscript (B), she can be seen habitually reaching for the underlying tone of the psalm and then seeking to embody it in appropriate Elizabethan modes of thought and image. One early example of her meditational independence can be seen in two stanzas in the early draft of Psalm 62, for which she had only the barest hint in the original text:

Obviously the passage required some drastic revisions in its syntax and coherence, but even at this early stage the Countess' determination to express her original's sense through a telling metaphor can be seen. The imagery of planting and harvesting, although appropriate to the context, is nowhere hinted at in her sources. In fact, the revised version in A omits most of these original additions to the Psalm—the Countess' second thoughts were not always best.

A useful comparison may be made among the three very different versions of Psalm 122: one found in A J F K C D O N, a second in B I G1 E H L (both in asclepiads) and the third in G M (a rhymed version, in 6 six-line ababcc stanzas). Despite their common original, each poem develops independently, with related but distinctive imagery and variations in tone and movement. The opening will serve as an example. The Geneva Bible version of verses 1-3 reads:

In the early version in asclepiads found in B I G1 E H L these verses are somewhat awkwardly expressed, as the Countess attempts to master the demands of quantitative verse:

O what lively delight, O what a jollity
This news unto me brought newly delivered
That Gods house ruined should be re-edifyd
And that shortly we should every man enter it.

O now thy galerys, lovely Jerusalem
Thy gates shall be my rest; now at unorderd
Nor wide scatred as erst, but very citty-like
All commond in one shall be Jerusalem.
(1-8)

The version prepared for the presentation copy to the Queen uses five lines only, and has a slightly different emphasis:

O fame most joyfull! O joy most lovly delightfull!
Loe, I do heare Godds temple, as erst, soe again be frequented,
And we within thy proches againe gladwonted abiding,
Lovly Salem shall find: thou Citty rebuilt as a Citty,
Late disperst, but now united in absolute order.
(1-5)

When the final version (G M) was written, and the quantitative experiments abandoned, the Countess uses two leisurely hymn-like stanzas:

Clearly, what we have are three separate poems, with a similar subject and tone, but with few precise hints of a common original. Indeed, with the quantitative versions, the exigencies of form are such that it is possible only in the most general terms to relate the Countess' poems to the original Psalm. With the relatively easier demands of the rhymed stanzas, the G M version is more easily established as being derived directly from the Psalm. But in no sense does the Countess appear to be concerned with literal accuracy of translation. In fact, two of the three versions give different interpretations to the third verse of the Psalm. The Countess speaks of Zion being "rebuilt" (122 A), "re-edifyd" (122 B) suggesting the speaker is overjoyed at returning to a city, rebuilt on former ruins. None of the translations, glosses or commentaries suggest such an interpretation, but it certainly underlines the mood of rejoicing. The "wee to thee have made repaire" of 122 G M, simply means "return," a sense also found in Sidney's Psalm 9.5, and here the Countess returns to the Psalm's accustomed reading.

What the psalms in this edition offer, then, above all, is a chance to see an Elizabethan poet through the process of revision discovering the means of writing sophisticated and moving verse. None of the psalms printed here are, therefore, among the Countess' best. Their interest lies largely in the way they help us to trace the growth of her poetical skills—and, often, the mechanics of a poet's development may be seen best in his least finished works. For her best psalms, we should turn, perhaps, to the Penshurst Manuscript [A], printed by Rathmell—to her magnificent versions, say, of Psalms 51, 88, 90, 130, or 148 which are among the high points of religious verse of the age. We can see then how her Psalms helped to mark a new direction for post-Reformation poetry in England. As a patroness she directed others to the possibilities of writing religious verse in English as fine as that she saw across the Channel; but she was, even more importantly, a practitioner—ambitious, uneven, sometimes brilliant—and her poems stand at their best as some of the finest contributions to a tradition of religious verse she helped to initiate. The psalms printed here should help us trace the mechanics of her poetical education.

Miscellaneous Poems and the Dedicatory Poems to the Psalms

Prefacing manuscript J of the Sidney Psalms, and presumably once existing in the incomplete manuscript A from which J was copied, are two poems by the Countess, a dedicatory poem to the Queen in 12 8-line stanzas, and a 13 stanza, 91-line poem signed at the end "By the Sister of that Incomparable Sidney," and entitled "To the Angeli spirit of the most excellent Sir Phillip Sidney." The poem to the Queen, "Even now that Care wch on thy Crowne attends," has never been discussed before the present study, while the only easily accessible printed version of "To the Angell spirit…" exists in Ringler's edition of Sidney. In the 1623 edition of the works of Samuel Daniel, however, appeared the text of a poem similarly entitled "To the Angell Spirit of the most excellent, S^r. Phillip Sidney"; it was reprinted by Grosart in his collected edition of Daniel and until the version in J was brought to light, Daniel's authorship was unquestioned.²⁴ J proves that the version attributed to Daniel was clearly an early draft which somehow found its way into Daniel's papers before being revised by the Countess for inclusion in the presentation volume of the Psalms. In 1962, Dr. B. E. Juel-Jensen, the owner of J printed a limited, private edition of the two poems in his manuscript. They are printed here from J with his most generous permission.

"Even now that Care …" is dated 1600 on folio ii^v of J, but the date has been corrected in another hand (perhaps that of the Countess herself) to 1599. It is written in 12 8-line stanzas in iambic pentameters rhyming ababbdbd, a demanding stanzaic form that she uses in Psalm 104, one of her more successful longer poems of celebration. The form is confidently handled; the poem is clearly structured and rises at time to moving heights of passion—particularly when the Countess recalls her dead brother. Generally the poem combines the qualities of the encomium, a poem, according to Puttenham's description, which honours "the persons of great Princes," with the elegy of lamentation of the "death, the irrecoverable losse, death, the dolefull departure" of her brother.²⁵ Typically, the Countess modifies what is essentially a public form into a more private meditation. The first two stanzas thus stress the unworthiness of such a gift to lay before the transcendent majesty of the Queen yet, the poet asserts, " … dare I so, as humblenes may dare / cherish some hope they shall acceptance finde …" (9-10).

The following four stanzas go on to suggest, however, that the psalms are offered not just as "Postes of Dutie and Goodwill," but are as well a gift with peculiar personal poignancy:

… once in two, now in one Subject goe,
the poorer left, the richer reft awaye:
Who better might (O might ah word of woe,)
haue giv'n for mee what I for him defraye.
(21-24)

Stanzas seven and eight return to the praise of Elizabeth, the centre and epitome of England's glory and the inspirer of its poets:

For in our worke what bring wee but thine owne?
What English is, by many names is thine.
There humble Lawrells in thy shadowes growne
To garland others woorld, themselves repine.
Thy brest the Cabinet, thy seat the shrine,
Where Muses hang their vowed memories …
(41-46)

The final four stanzas go on to extend the complement to the Queen. "A King should onely to a Queene bee sent" (53), and hence David's Psalms are an appropriate gift. As well, the Psalms prophetically anticipate Elizabeth's own reign:

And who sees ought, but sees how justly square
his haughtie Ditties to thy glorious daies?
(58-59)

Elizabeth as the second David was a favourite notion of Elizabethan Protestant propagandists. The Countess dwells briefly on the parallels between King David and the Queen, and the poem culminates in a wish that

… shee may (farre past hir living Peeres
And Rivall still to Iudas Faithfull King)
In more than hee and more triumphant yeares,
Sing what God doth, and doo What men may sing.
(93-96)

A great deal of what is typical of the Countess' poetry is found in this poem: a high degree of metrical competence, a fine sense of structure, good control of decorous tone, a varied syntactical movement, marred occasionally by strained idioms or syntax. As well, there are hints of the intellectual dialectic which I have found throughout her work and the Sidney Circle as a whole. The praise of the Queen, like that in the pastoral dialogue with which I shall deal below, mounts to an assertion of her near-supernatural powers:

Thus hand in hand with him thy glories walke:
but who can trace them where alone they goe?
Of thee two hemispheres on honor talke,
and lands and seas thy Trophees iointly showe.
The very windes did on thy partie blowe,
and rocks in armes thy foe men eft defie …
(73-78)

Not only the royal servant of the Lord, she is the glory of the world, waited on by the Creation itself, which (the reference to the Armada is unmistakable) lends her aid against her enemies. Then, a more sceptical voice intervenes, tempering such praise:

But soft my muse, Thy pitch is earthly lowe;
forbeare this heau'n, where onely Eagles flie.
(79-80)

On the public level, the poem is competent if somewhat commonplace. It is particularly interesting, however, for the way the encomium to Elizabeth is interrupted by four stanzas of particular passion on the subject of Sidney. Although such personal asides were a well established part of elegaic poems, the digressio here is as unusual in its way as that in Milton's Lycidas. The fourth stanza, especially, has an urgency and depth of personal feeling unusual for the kind of poem "Even now that care …" purports to be:

How can I name whom sighing sighes extend,
and not unstopp my teares eternali spring?
but hee did warpe, I weau'd this webb to end;
the stuffe not ours, our worke no curious thing,
Wherein yet well wee thought the Psalmist King
Now English denizend, though Hebrue borne,
woold to thy musicke undispleased sing,
Oft having worse, without repining worne.
(25-32)

The depth and extent of the Countess' devotion to her brother's memory makes this poem of dedication to the Queen a tribute to Sidney.

Its companion poem, "To the Angell Spirit …" intensifies in an even more interesting way our awareness of the Countess' love for and debt to her brother. If, as seems certain, the version printed by Samuel Daniel's brother in Daniel's collected works of 1623 is an early draft of the Countess' poem, then once again we can watch the process of the Countess' revisions. The early version (Dn) has two rather syntactically confused stanzas between stanzas three and four of the version in J, and it lacks any versions of the later stanzas eight, ten, and twelve. The version in J has 13 7-line stanzas rhyming abbacca, in regular lines of 10 syllables, mainly pentameters. The stanza form resembles those of the Countess' Psalms 63 and 106, except that the rhyme scheme is somewhat tighter. Although the stanza pattern of the earlier version is the same it is much more loosely executed, as one would expect from an early draft.

To set the two versions side-by-side is to reinforce the observations made earlier on the Countess' revisions of the Psalms. As well as the substantial additions and deletions, virtually every line is altered in accidentals. Sometimes phrases or words are shifted from lines nearby, usually the meaning is tightened or made more succinct. Thus "Made only thine, and no more else must weare" (Dn, 73) becomes "well are they borne, no title else shall beare" (J.87); "Thine by his owne, and what is done of mine …" (Dn, 3) becomes the more evocative "First rais'de by thy blest hand, and what is mine …" (J.3). A similar advance in both force and meaning is gained from changing "Nor can enough, though justly here contrould" (Dn, 42) to "Nor can enough in world of words unfold" (J.28).

The revised version, too, is a much more personal work; in fact its strength arises from its tone of peculiarly sincere and personal grief for Sidney, expressed in evocative and moving tones of gratitude for his love and inspiration. Indeed, it is as if the Countess had no other motive for writing than to express her private grief and dedication:

One special revision the Countess made which intensifies this note of love is found in the second stanza. Dn's version reflects the Sidney Circle's constant concern with the patriotic duty of enhancing literary standards and, rather pompously, praises English as a fit language for a translation of the Psalms:

That Israels King may daygne his owne transform'd
In substance no, but superficiali tire:
And English guis'd in some sort may aspire
To better grace thee what the vulgar form'd:
His Sacred Tones, age after age admire.
Nations grow great in pride, and pure desire
So to excell in holy rites perform'd.
(Dn, 9-15)

In J, however, the stanza is significantly changed. The tone becomes less stentorian, a more personal note intrudes, as the lines become more concerned with the inexactitude of the Countess' work beside her brothers':

… those high Tons, so in themselues adorn'd,
which Angells sing in their coelestiall Quire,
and of all tongues with soule and uoice admire
Theise sacred Hymnes thy Kinglie Prophet form'd.
(11-14)

Looked at in the context of the many poetic laments written for Sidney, the poem compares favourably with the majority of those written after Sidney's death, with the obvious exception of Spenser's "Astrophel." It is, of course, not strictly an elegy in the classical sense, although the Elizabethan's understanding of "elegy" varied greatly. It fits what Puttenham calls a "poeticall lamentation," even though Puttenham himself links the elegy with love plaints. Commenting on the confusion of genres in Elizabethan poetic theory, Howard C. Cole notes that "love is surely a fundamental part of that often lamentable human condition. Our more restricted sense of this kind as fit only to mourn and praise the dead had not yet evolved … from the elegy [and] the Elizabethan reader expected a certain mood and tone, but no special subject."²⁶ Hence the variety of Elizabethan elegies: some of Spenser's Amoretti as well as his Astrophel would be accurately described as elegaic by strict Renaissance criteria.

But rather than being judged strictly by generic terms, the Countess' poem is most usefully seen in terms of her own life and writings. Her mixture of dedication, mourning, and deep love again turns a public poem into an intensely, perhaps even morbidly, interesting and moving poem. Expanding on and echoing the personal digression in the preceding poem to the Queen, it is in fact addressed solely to her brother's "Angell spirit":

It is intended as a private dedication of the completed work on the Psalms to Sidney and as an apology for what she feels to be the inferiority of her part:

The conventional note of praise that a generation of fellow-poets gave to Sidney is in the Countess' poem intensely personalized and indeed, acquires a strangely rapturous tone. Sidney is her poetic inspiration—"what is mine / inspir'd by thee, thy secrett power imprest" (3-4)—and, as well, the conventional "Phoenix," the "Matchlesse Muse," his example, like his person, exceeding "Nature's store" (8, 23, 36). The poem relates in more formal elegaic style how he died with so many unfulfilled achievements:

Sidney the Phoenix, the Muse, the ever-praised Name: however passionately expressed, such terms are conventional enough. Typically, too, the Countess' neo-Platonic tendencies are seen in the transcendent terms she chooses to praise her brother. He becomes, in heaven, the very embodiment of divine Grace, whom even to approach is "presumption too too bold" (25):

Furthermore, it is, the poem goes on, for him alone that the Countess has been stirred to discover her own talents and complete the Psalms. In this passage, the reader notes something of unusual interest. We are encountering not merely the conventional admiration of Sidney "by all of worth," but something more personal and disturbing:

Especially in the context of the Countess' other poems on her brother—and her evident dedication of her life to his ideals—such a stanza provokes more than usually intense speculation. The tone of adulation might well have provoked comments like those from Ben Jonson upon Donne's Anniversary poems as "profane and full of blasphemies … if it had been written of the Virgin Mary it has been something." To such a remark the Countess might well have replied, in her Thenot vein, that she too was describing the Idea of Sidney—and gone on to add, like Donne, "not as he was." But for the pious Countess, this praise of her brother has a peculiarly personal ring, underlined by the strangely worded note of intense intimacy in a line which was not found in the earlier version, " … my thought, whence so strange passions flowe" (46). It is as if in revision what has been implied throughout this poem, its companion piece and, indeed, her whole career as a poet is now being made explicit. It is as if a veil is being lifted very briefly, unwillingly, even unconsciously. Her love for her brother passes even her own understanding. With caution, we may recall Aubrey's speculation that "there was so great love between [Sidney] and his faire sister that I have heard old Gentlemen say that they lay together …"²⁷ Although scandalously unfounded on any public fact, Aubrey's gossip may vaguely point to something real, to the degree of intensity of feeling between Philip and Mary, especially on the side of the Countess. Without trying to turn the Countess of Pembroke into an Elizabethan Dorothy Wordsworth, there is no doubt that the deepest emotional commitment of her life was to her brother, both before and especially after his death. All the evidence of her writings suggests that Sidney's person, example and ideals were at the centre of her life, and while any further speculation about the relationship takes the scholar into the perils of historical psychoanalysis, nevertheless it is important for our understanding of the Countess to realize that the feelings she retained for her brother were, for a sister, remarkable in their strength. Here in this second, personal poem dedicating her life's literary work, we see revealed feelings that could perhaps only be revealed in a few lines of verse, years after their subject was dead.

Less certainly but probably the Countess' is the so-called "Dolefull Lay of Clorinda." Sometime in the 1590s—a later scribe adds the date 1594—the Countess wrote to Sir Edward Wotton:

Cossen Wotton[:] the first message this paper shall deliuer is my best salutafon and euer welwishinge to yr self[:] from that wonted good affecfon still continued doe acknowledge yow worthy of the same regarde wherein yow are asseured to rest for suche hath bin your merit not onlie towards my self but in memory of that loue to him w^ch held you a deere and speciall frende of his (who was to me as you knowe) [.] I must and doe and euer will doe you this right[.] w^ch downe[,] the next is that these maie redeeme a certaine Idle passion which longe since I left in your hands onlie being desyrous to reuiew what the Image could be of those sadd tymes….²⁸

The Countess' reference to the "certaine Idle passion," is not only reminiscent of the appropriate sprezzatura that a refined courtly lady would have towards her own writing, but an echo of Sidney's own remark on the Arcadia that it was an "idle work … fitter to be swept away than worn to any other purpose."²⁹ The remark obviously refers to a poem associated with "those sadd tymes" surrounding the death of Sidney. It is doubtful, if the letter does date from 1594, that the "passion" is "To the Angell spirit…" which seems to have been written in the later years of the decade, after the Psalms had been completed and collected for the presentation copy to the Queen. It refers, instead, to a poem written specifically on the death of Sidney, which is probably the so-called "Dolefull Lay of Clorinda," first published along with Spenser's "Astrophel" and other elegies by Ralegh, Royden, Dyer and Bryskett in Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1595).

The 1595 Quarto of Colin Clout, which has been used as the copy-text and collated with later editions, is dedicated as a whole to Ralegh, and contains the title-piece, followed by "Astrophel, / A Pastoral Elegie upon / the death of the most Noble and valorvs / Knight, Sir Philip Sidney." It is dedicated to the Countess of Essex, Sidney's widow. "Astrophel" is followed by what is now usually known as "The Dolefull Lay of Clorinda," an untitled poem, clearly separated from "Astrophel" by a tailpiece on sig. F4^v, a headpiece of a band of type-ornaments on sig. G1^r, a three-quarter blank page on sig. F4^v, and an ornamental initial capital letter at the start of the new poem. It is linked with "Astrophel" by 6 lines of explanatory verse and with the following elegy, by Bryskett, with 12 lines on sig. G3^r. The title-page of the collection of elegies mentions no authors or editor, but "Astrophel" is clearly Spenser's, and it seems probable that he collected the other elegies, briefly introducing the others in the body of the work in the link passages at "Astrophel" (211-216), and that following the lay of Clorinda (107-108).

Did the Countess of Pembroke write the "dolefull lay"? Spenser certainly seems to state this quite explicitly:

But first his sister that Clorinda hight,
The gentlest shepheardesse that lives this day
And most resembling both in shape and spright
Her brother deare, began this dolefull lay …
(211-214)

Doubts about the attribution might seem unnecessary, and the Countess' authorship was in fact unchallenged until Ernest de Selincourt asserted in his Oxford Standard Authors edition of Spenser (1908) that the poem was Spenser's. He suggested briefly that the Lay showed "the peculiarly Spenserian effects of rhythm and melody" and that since it was "not a separate work … it is more natural … to believe that Spenser wrote it in her name."³⁰ In 1920, Percy W. Long similarly argued for Spenser's authorship, pointing out likenesses between the Lay and the August and November Eclogues in The Shepheards Calender. He concentrated in particular upon stanzaic and metrical similarities, arguing somewhat simply that in all three poems, the second line of the stanza usually ends in a colon.³¹

Following Long's arguments, Charles G. Osgood and H. D. Rix further analysed the rhetorical structure of the Lay, arguing for its characteristically Spenserian effects.³² Few scholars bothered to challenge their ascription and for want of a champion, the Countess might have lain unrescued. However, in 1935, in the first fully detailed review of the evidence, W. G. Friedrich came to the conclusion that the Lay was almost certainly written by the Countess. He pointed out that the "Spenserian" effects on which former arguments were based are common to a number of Elizabethan poets, that the sixain is equally common, and that Long's argument about colons at the end of the stanza's second line is "absurd in the light of what we know about Elizabethan punctuation."³³ Moreover, as he wryly indicated, some of the Lay's careless or strained lines are hardly up to Spenser's standard of competence, and for Spenser to attempt deliberately to write less polished verse in order to pass it off as the Countess' would have been an insult to both of them.³⁴

More positively, there is in fact sound evidence for the Countess' authorship. The Lay is clearly separated by three quarters of a page of blank space from "Astrophel"; the running title of Spenser's elegy is discontinued; there are ornamental head and end pieces to the Lay and an ornamental initial capital letter to mark the poem's beginning—all of which suggest specific authoritative instructions to or inferences by the printer. As well, there is a distinct difference in quality between the two poems and a vital difference in tone. The Lay approximates closely to a formal Greek elegy, while "Astrophel" is a narrative lyric suggestive of the Homeric hymns. Moreover, not only, as Friedrich showed, do the "Spenserian" tone and ornamentation of the Lay include features common to a host of Elizabethan pastoral elegies, but there are definite verbal links with the Countess' own "To the Angell spirit…. " The Lay reads:

But that immortall spirit, which was deckt
With all the dowries of celestiall grace:
By soueraine choyce from th'hevenly quires select,
And lineally deriu'd from Angels race …
(61-64)

The echoes of "To the Angell spirit…" with its emphasis on "Thy Angells soule with highest Angells plac't" (59) are evident and constitute internal evidence at least as strong as anything offered in support of Spenser. Finally, there is the definite ascription of the Lay to Sidney's sister in the introductory verses, already quoted. Elsewhere, in "The Ruines of Time," Spenser writes:

Then will I sing: but who can better sing
Than thine owne sister, peerles Ladie bright,
Which to thee sings with deep harts sorrowing,
Sorrowing tempered with deare delight.
That her to heare I feele my feeble spright
Robbed of sense, and ravished with joy,
O sad joy made of mourning and anoy.³⁵

"The preponderance of evidence," as Friedrich sums up, "is certainly in favor of the Countess of Pembroke's authorship."³⁶ The poem would take its place naturally within a memorial volume edited by Spenser, in cooperation with William Ponsonby, who had something like the unofficial status of the Sidney family publisher. The Countess was probably consulted about the collection; her letter to Wotton mentioning the "certaine Idle passion" may refer to a request for a copy of her poem to be returned so it might be included in the volume.

We have some hints as to the poem's date. While most of the elegies to Sidney appeared in or about 1587, "Astrophel" itself was probably not written until 1590 or 1591. Spenser's apologies for not publicly bewailing Sidney's death appeared in the dedicatory epistle to The Ruines of Time (1591) addressed to the Countess herself. He speaks there of friends' complaints "that I haue not shewed anie thankefull remembraunce towards him,"³⁷ although it may be the epistle had been written some time before the work's publication, perhaps shortly after Spenser's return from Ireland late in 1589. However, in the lines from The Ruines of Time already quoted, he speaks of the Countess singing her poem: " … with deep harts sorrowing, / Sorrowing tempered with deare delight," and the probable inference is that by 1589-1591, the "dolefull lay" was in existence; Friedrich in fact speculates, although without real evidence, that the Countess may, like so many others, have written it in 1587, the year of Sidney's funeral.³⁸ The authorship of the "Lay" can probably never be finally settled by the external evidence available: but what there is points to the traditional and (it should be added) authoritatively Spenserian attribution to the Countess.

I turn now to the poem itself. The "Lay" is written, carefully but not always competently, within the originally Greek elegiac tradition of Theocritus, Biron, Virgil's Bucolics and a number of Renaissance French and Italian elegists. The major features of the tradition are carefully inserted into the poem—the mourning for the dead shepherd by all nature (25-28), the complaint against the heavens for allowing such a tragedy (7-12), the address to fellow shepherds (37-42), the change from mourning to consolation caused by the reassurance of the dead shepherd's immortality (69-90). But as in "To the Angell spirit …" the Countess brings to the commonplaces of the tradition a note of deeply personal grief:

Great losse to all that ever him did see,
Great losse to all, but greatest losse to mee.
(35-36)

There are lines strongly reminiscent of the reference to Sidney in "To the Angell Spirit …," again suggesting a similarity of tone and intention between the two poems. He is "that immortall spirit" (61) in the "Lay," just as "thy Angell's soule" is "with highest Angells plac't" ("To the Angell Spirit," 59). As I suggested, such conventional neo-Platonic terminology is constantly given an extra intensity by the Countess' personal grief. Although her argument is somewhat tangled syntactically in this poem, the sense can be made out reasonably clearly. Sidney's mortal body, she asserts, is only a reflection of his departed soul, and yet it too is but a shadow, passing quickly through its earthly existence, back to its origin "lineally deriv'd from Angels race" (64). Spenser has a similarly worded passage in "Daphnaida" (211-217), but the closest parallel here is clearly the Countess' other poem to her brother.

So far as its quality is concerned, the "Lay" is a mixture of personal intensity, solid metrical competence, and much flatness and not a little padding. After the smooth, mellifluous melancholy of "Astrophel" it reads like the work of a competent amateur—although it does compare favourably with the other elegies in the volume. Typically, it is carefully structured, moving from two initial complaints to the heavens and men to the personal:

Then to my selfe will I my sorrow mourne,
Sith none aliue like sorrowful remaines …
(19-20)

Then follows a series of apostrophes: Nature is called on to mourn, the shepherds are exhorted to cease their singing and abandon their garlands, death itself is assailed, until a final note of reassurance is reached in the vision of immortality.

The structure is clear, if conventional; the execution is somewhat wooden, a careful exercise in rhetoric, moving from the dubitatio of the first stanza to the expeditio of stanza four. The most important rhetorical scheme is the allegoria of Sidney as a flower in stanzas five to seven, which is couched in terms again reminiscent of "To the Angell spirit…. " The final flourish, too, is an echo of the later poem—an apostrophe which is an appropriate mixture of the personal and the conventional:

But liue thou there still happie, happie spirit,
And giue us leave thee here thus to lament:
Not thee that doest thy heauens ioy inherit,
But our owne selues that here in dole are drent.

Thus do we weep and waile, and wear our eies,
Mourning in others, our owne miseries.
(91-96)

Unquestionably the Countess' work is a modest pastoral poem entitled "A Dialogve between two shepheards, Thenot and Piers, in Praise of Astrea." It was first published in Francis Davison's A Poetical Rhapsody, which first appeared in 1602, with subsequent editions in 1608, 1611, and 1621. The 1602 edition has been used as the copy-text for this edition and collated with the later printings of the work. The miscellany includes verses from a collection of poets including Campion, Sidney, Wotton and Spenser. The "Dialogue" is ascribed to the Countess, and subtitled in the first edition "Made by the excellent Lady, the Lady Mary Countess of Pembroke, at the Queen Majesty's being at her house at ######, Anno 15##." Nothing is known of such a visit to Wilton, although manuscript A of the Psalms was obviously prepared as a presentation copy to the Queen for such a visit. Most likely, a visit was planned, and the "Dialogue" composed in anticipation of the event, which never took place.

The "Astrea" of the poem is, of course, Elizabeth the righteous virgin, and the poem is one of a host of similar commonplace tributes to Elizabeth, but it is more interesting than most. Conventionally, the two shepherds, Thenot and Piers, compete with each other to sing Astrea's praises. Thenot's celebration is courtly in tone and neo-Platonic in its philosophic implications, with the divinity of Astrea being apprehended by her subjects through natural and cosmic phenomena. She is "a field in flowery robe arrayed," the "heauenly light that guides the day"; she "sees with wisdom's sight" and "works by virtue's might" (38, 43, 19, 20). Virtue and wisdom are not just represented by her but embodied in her—they "iontly both do stay in her." By seeing and meditating on Astrea's beauty, man may attain to truth. "Let us therefore," argues Bembo, "bend all our force and thoughtes of soule to this most holy light, that sheweth the way which leadeth to heaven … let us climbe up the staires, which at the lowermost steppe have the shadowe of sensuali beauty, to the high mansion place where the heavenly, amiable and right beautie dwelleth, which lyeth in the innermost secretes of God…. "³⁹

Piers, on the other hand, is characterized as a conscientious, indeed iconoclastic, Protestant, who voices the doctrine so stressed by Calvinists of the absolute transcendence of the divine and the inability of man's unaided mind to attain to genuine truth. He warns against fallen man's tendency to self-deceptiveness, and clearly echoes the Platonic rejection of poetry as untrustworthy:

Not only is the corrupt human mind unable to reach any truth, but plain speaking without the distorting intervention of the fancy is stressed. To each of Thenot's claims, Piers' response is firmly in the Protestant tradition which rejects any metaphorical means of describing the Divinity, until the confrontation is summed up in the final verse:

Words cannot embody the ineffability of the divine. Although Piers' final rejection means that a greater compliment is thereby paid to Astrea/Elizabeth, it is not unimportant that it is the Calvinist suspicion of the mind's ability to apprehend truth which has the last word.

The poem's verbal texture regrettably does not match its intellectual aspirations. It is merely a charming minor piece, and can be called no more than competent, as if the Countess was over-captivated by the ideological contrast she was developing and somewhat neglectful of its metaphorical impact. It is, however, typically well-constructed. It is written in sixains, 10 stanzas rhyming aabccb, and the movement of the lines is often appropriately forceful. The structure, too, is clear and logically developed: Elizabeth is progressively praised in terms of the whole creation, the earth itself, wisdom and virtue, goodness, joys and riches, the seasons, the divine light, the generative creativity of the universe, and finally the power of the transforming human imagination seen in poetry itself. As each compliment mounts to the height of the poet's erected wit, Piers' answering qualification is appropriately formulated. The poem's effect is, however, often spoiled by a rather unidiomatic syntax—especially in the breathlessly tumbling syllables of Piers' replies, which are perhaps designed to convey the cryptic plainness of the Protestant. The Countess was probably striving to echo in miniature the sparse, tortured lines of a poet like Greville whose scepticism about the power of poetry is rather like that of Piers, just as Thenot recalls the aspiring wit of the poet of Sidney's Defence, or the "clear spirits" of Greville's Caelica.⁴⁰

The poems [in my volume], therefore, offer the modern student the opportunity to assess her place within late Elizabethan poetry. Her more famous brother Philip has long been served well by editors and commentators; her other brother Robert's poetry has recently been discovered and editorial and critical work is now commencing upon his poetry. Their equally deserving sister, the Countess of Pembroke, occupies an important place within the Sidney family's attempts to give a firm basis to the Elizabethan poetical revolution and along with J. C. A. Rathmell's edition of the Penshurst text of the Psalms, the present edition should help to bring out the substantial merits of this too long neglected Elizabethan poet.

Notes

¹Poems of William Browne of Tavistock, ed. George Goodwin (London, n.d.), II, p. 294.

² See Edmund Spenser, "Colin Clout," 11. 487-491; Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed. O. L. Dick (Harmondsworth, 1962), pp. 219-221; Samuel Daniel, Delia (London, 1592), Dedication; John Aubrey, The Natural History of Wiltshire, ed. John Britton (London, 1847), p. 86.

³ J. W. Cunliffe, "The Queens Majesties Entertainment at Woodstocke," PMLA, XXVI (1911), 100.

⁴John Buxton, Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance (London, 1954), p. 3.

⁵ Sir Philip Sidney, Works, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge, 1961), III, p. 35.

⁶ Thomas Nashe, Pierce Pennilesse, in Works, ed. E. D. McKerrow (London, 1958), I, p. 139.

⁷ Buxton, Sidney, p. 12.

⁸Ibid, p. 236.

⁹ James O. Osborn, Young Philip Sidney (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), p. 5.

¹⁰ Barnabe Barnes, Poems, ed. E. Arber, An English Garner, V (London, 1895), p. 485; Thomas Nashe, preface to Astrophel and Stella (London, 1591).

¹¹ Nicholas Breton, Wits Trenchmour (London, 1593), pp. 18-20: A Pilgrimage to Paradise (Oxford, 1592), Dedication.

¹² See Daniel Javitch, "The Philosopher of the Court: a French Satire Misunderstood," CL, XXIII (1971), 97-124.

¹³ Walter Sweeper, A Brief Treatise declaring the True Noble-man, and the Base Worldling (London, 1623), sigs A3^r-A4^v.

¹⁴ Sidney, Works, III, pp. 8-9.

¹⁵ Robert Coogan, "Petrarch's Trionfi and the Renaissance," SP, LXVII (1970), 306.

¹⁶ Quotations from Morley's translation are taken from the edition of D. D. Carnecelli (Cambridge, Mass., 1971).

¹⁷ D. G. Rees, "Petrarch's 'Trionfo della Morte' in English," Italian Studies, VII (1952), 86-87.

¹⁸ Renee Neu Watkins, "Petrarch and the Black Death: From Fear to Monuments," SRen, XXIX (1972), 222.

¹⁹ Ringler, p. 502.

²⁰ Bodleian MS Rawlinson poet. 25, fol. 131^v.

²¹ Other possible echoes of the Authorized Version are given in Noel J. Kinnamon, "Melle de Petra: The Sources and the Form of the Sidneian Psalms," Diss. University of North Carolina 1976, p. 168.

²² Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables (Cambridge, 1976), p. 205.

²³ J. C. A. Rathmell (ed.), The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke (New York, 1963), p. xx.

²⁴ Quotations from Daniel's version are taken from The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Samuel Daniel, ed. A. B. Grosart (London, 1885), I, 267-269.

²⁵Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (London, 1908), II, 49-50.

²⁶Elizabethan Critical Essays, II, p. 49; Howard C. Cole, A Quest of Inquirie (New York, 1973), p. 285.

²⁷Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (London, 1928), I, p. 133; John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. O. L. Dick (Harmondsworth, 1962), p. 220.

²⁸ F. B. Young, Mary Sidney Countess of Pembroke (London, 1912), p. 56.

²⁹ Sir Philip Sidney, Works, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge, 1912), I, p. 3; The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia: the Old Arcadia, ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford, 1974), p. 3.

³⁰ Edmund Spenser, Poetical Works, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1908), p. xxxv.

³¹ Percy W. Long, "Spenseriana: the Lay of Clorinda," MLN, XXI (1916), 79-82.

³² H. D. Rix, "Spenser's Rhetoric and the 'Doleful Lay'," MLN, LIII (1938), 261-265; Charles G. Osgood, "The Doleful Lay of Clorinda," MLN, XXXV (1920), 90-96.

³³ "The Astrophel Elegies," Diss. Johns Hopkins 1934, 15.

³⁴Ibid., 25.

³⁵ "The Ruines of Time," 11. 316-322, Spenser, Minor Poems, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1912), p. 137.

³⁶ Friedrich, 25.

³⁷ "The Ruines of Time," Dedication, Minor Poems, p. 126.

³⁸ Friedrich, 45.

³⁹ Baldesar Castiglione, The Boke of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby, introd. W. H. D. Rouse (London, 1928), pp. 268-269.

⁴⁰ Fulke Greville, Caelica, LXXX.