Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship

"Warpe” and “Webb” in the Sidney Psalms: The “Coupled Worke” of the Countess of Pembroke and Sir Philip Sidney

Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) and his sister, the Countess of Pembroke (1561–1621), constituted one of the most powerful literary alliances in early modern England. Both now have major editions of their complete works, with the Clarendon edition of Lady Mary Sidney Herbert being the more recent addition to this pantheon of canonical status. Though subject to the vagaries of critical taste, their lives, reputations, and accomplishments remain inextricably intertwined. Poet, courtier, soldier, Sidney died in October 1586 at Arnhem, in the Protestant Netherlands, of infection from a wound inflicted twentysix days earlier at the battle of Zutphen. His state funeral four months later resulted in an unprecedented outpouring of elegies and laments for “England’s Mars and Muse.”1 Sidney published only two anonymous poems during his short life, preferring the more aristocratic medium of extensive manuscript circulation for his work: a pastoral entertainment for the queen entitled The Lady of May; Certain Sonnets, a combination of thirty-two translated and original poems; The Old Arcadia, a five-act tragicomedy recounting intricate searches for love among royalty and rustics, with pastoral interludes or “eglogues”; The New Arcadia, an incomplete 41 “Warpe” and “Webb” in the Sidney Psalms The “Coupled Worke” of the Countess of Pembroke and Sir Philip Sidney   revision in an expanded three-book epic format ; 108 sonnets and eleven songs comprising Astrophil and Stella, which anatomizes the blend of erotics and ethics in a love affair; A Defence of Poetry, a spirited, wide-ranging response to Stephen Gosson’s attack against poets; First Week, a translation of a portion of du Bartas’s La Semaine ou la Création du Monde; and a metrical paraphrase of the first forty-three psalms. With his portrait enshrined, as early as the seventeenth century, in the Upper Reading Room of the new Bodleian Library and his reputation as “the greatest of the moderns,” Sidney has never lacked scholarly champions, who credit him with having “compiled what might be regarded as a School of English Versification,” giving “a sense of God’s presence” by showing “the prophetic element in the Psalms,” and having “changed the private character of manuscript production.”2 Although in dedicating the Arcadia to his sister Sidney affected a gentlemanly casualness about “this idle work . . . which (like the spider’s web) will be thought fitter to be swept away, . . . this child which [he was] loath to father,” he reminds her—in the more serious hope that the work may be “perchance made much of ”—that it was composed “in [her] presence” by a brother “who doth exceedingly love you.”3 The enduring, generative, and erotically charged bonds of this love and the literary projects and judgments that united them are the major motifs in the Sidney legend, which Pembroke promoted. In fact, the tradition of consigning Mary Sidney Herbert to the periphery as merely the agent for ensuring her late brother’s renown—revising his work, circulating some in manuscript and shepherding others through the press— persisted until a few decades ago. The exception was Frances Young’s pioneering biography, designating her subject as a genuine “intellectual .” Felix Schelling considered it both gallant and charitable to admit that he did not “really know the poetical value of her translation of the Psalms.” T. S. Eliot’s so-called apology, addressing none of her works, halfheartedly attempted to raise the circle “from the ignominy of wealthy well-born amateurs of the arts.”4 Recent reformulators of the early modern canon (e.g., Jonathan Goldberg, Beth Wynne Fisken, Margaret Hannay, and Theodore Steinberg) have explored Mary Sidney Herbert’s independent, virtuosic range, from the psychological reality and conversational immediacy of her work to its astutely positioned political commentary and metrical daring. Pembroke actually established more credentials as a translator than her brother, having published under her own name an English version 42   blending “Senecan manner” and “Plutarchan materials” of Robert Garnier’s Tragedie of Antonie, which “paved the way for explicitly political history plays . . . including those of Shakespeare and Daniel,” as well as a prose version of Philippe de Mornay’s Discours de la Vie et de la Mort, in which she probed and expanded such dicta as life being “a Penelopes web, wherein we are alwayes doing and undoing” and “but continuall dyeng.”5 The work circulated in manuscript comprises the “finest English version” of Petrarch’s Trionfo della Morte; the completion of the Psalter project...