Mary (Sidney) Herbert :: Критика
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Критика
Mary Sidney's imaginative, lively and warm style is filled with "Sidneian fire", transparency and holy ardour. This ardour is apparent in 'matters of the heart', for example in the death scenes in her closet drama The Tragedy of Antonie (1592), which William Shakespeare may have used as source material for his Antony and Cleopatra (1607), as well as in her poetic masterpiece "The Psalms of David", which describes the pain of an earthly existence in the light of the divine comfort of 'grace'. The Psalms, which she considered her memorial, lack the weighty dignity of the Psalms of the Authorised Version (which was the crown of thirty years effort to forge English into a vehicle fit for theology). Mary's versions, though, have delightful and felicitous poetic forms and expressions. Her influence--through literary patronage, through her brother's works, through her own her poetry, drama, translations and theology (e.g. she translated Philippe de Mornay's Discourse of Life and Death to strengthen the international reformed community--cannot be easily quantified; it is clear that she had a strong influence on some of the finest literary fruits of the English Renaissance.
Her poetic epitaph, which is ascribed to Ben Jonson but which is more likely to have been written in an earlier form by poets William Browne and William Herbert (Mary's son), summarizes how she was regarded in her own day:
Underneath this sable hearse,
Lies the subject of all verse,
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother.
Death, ere thou hast slain another
Fair and learned and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee.
Mary, Countess of Pembroke was the most gifted woman writer of the English Renaissance, much praised, on her death by many, including the poetess Aemilia Lanier. She was the aunt of the poetess Lady Mary Wroth (the daughter of her brother, Henry Sidney, Earl of Leicester). She also influenced the religious writing of the divine and poet George Herbert (her sons' first cousin).
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