Wilton House and
Cleopatra. Mary Sidney turned Wilton House into a "paradise for poets", known as the "
Wilton Circle", a salon-type literary group sustained by her hospitality, which included
Edmund Spenser,
Samuel Daniel,
Michael Drayton,
Ben Jonson, and
Sir John Davies.
John Aubrey wrote, "Wilton House was like a college, there were so many learned and ingenious persons. She was the greatest patroness of wit and learning of any lady in her time." It has been suggested that the premiere of
Shakespeare's As You Like It was at Wilton during her life. of Shakespeare's plays; the first performance of the play may have been at Mary Sidney's house at Wilton Sidney received more dedications than any other woman of non-royal status. By some accounts, King James I visited Wilton on his way to his coronation in 1603 and stayed again at Wilton following the coronation to avoid the plague. She was regarded as a muse by Daniel in his
sonnet cycle "Delia", an anagram for ideal. Her brother,
Philip Sidney, wrote much of his
Arcadia in her presence, at Wilton House. He also probably began preparing his English lyric version of the
Book of Psalms at Wilton as well.
Sidney psalter Philip Sidney had completed translating 43 of the 150 Psalms at the time of his death on a military campaign against the Spanish in the
Netherlands in 1586. She finished his translation, composing Psalms 44 through to 150 in a dazzling array of verse forms, using the 1560
Geneva Bible and commentaries by
John Calvin and
Theodore Beza. Hallett Smith has called the psalter a "School of English Versification" , of 171 poems (Psalm 119 is a gathering of 22 separate ones). A copy of the completed
psalter was prepared for Queen Elizabeth I in 1599, in anticipation of a royal visit to Wilton, but Elizabeth cancelled her planned visit. This work is usually referred to as
The Sidney Psalms or The Sidney-Pembroke Psalter and regarded as a major influence on the development of English religious lyric poetry in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
John Donne wrote a poem celebrating the verse psalter and claiming he could "scarce" call the English Church reformed until its psalter had been modelled after the poetic transcriptions of Philip Sidney and Mary Herbert. Although the psalms were not printed in her lifetime, they were extensively distributed in manuscript. There are 17 manuscripts extant today. A later engraving of Herbert shows her holding them. Her literary influence can be seen in literary patronage, in publishing her brother's works and in her own verse forms, dramas, and translations. Contemporary poets who commended Herbert's psalms include Samuel Daniel, Sir John Davies, John Donne,
Michael Drayton,
Sir John Harington,
Ben Jonson,
Emilia Lanier and
Thomas Moffet. The importance of these is evident in the devotional lyrics of
Barnabe Barnes,
Nicholas Breton,
Henry Constable, Francis Davison,
Giles Fletcher, and
Abraham Fraunce. Their influence on the later religious poetry of Donne,
George Herbert,
Henry Vaughan, and
John Milton has been critically recognized since Louis Martz placed it at the start of a developing tradition of 17th-century devotional lyricism. Sidney was instrumental in bringing her brother's
An Apology for Poetry or
Defence of Poesy into print. She circulated the Sidney–Pembroke Psalter in manuscript at about the same time. This suggests a common purpose in their design. Both argued, in formally different ways, for the ethical recuperation of poetry as an instrument for moral instruction — particularly religious instruction. Sidney also took on editing and publishing her brother's
Arcadia, which he claimed to have written in her presence as ''The Countesse of Pembroke's Arcadia''.
Other works Sidney's closet drama
Antonius is a translation of a French play,
Marc-Antoine (1578) by
Robert Garnier. Mary is known to have translated two other works:
A Discourse of Life and Death by
Philippe de Mornay, published with
Antonius in 1592, and
Petrarch's
The Triumph of Death, circulated in manuscript. Her original poems include the pastoral "A Dialogue betweene Two Shepheards, Thenot and Piers, in praise of Astrea," and two dedicatory addresses, one to Elizabeth I and one to her own brother Philip, contained in the Tixall manuscript copy of her verse psalter. An elegy for Philip, "The dolefull lay of Clorinda", was published in
Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595) and attributed to Spenser and to Mary Herbert, but Pamela Coren attributes it to Spenser, though also saying that Mary's poetic reputation does not suffer from loss of the attribution. By at least 1591, the Pembrokes were providing patronage to a
playing company,
Pembroke's Men, one of the early companies to perform works of Shakespeare. According to one account, Shakespeare's company "The King's Men" performed at Wilton at this time. June and Paul Schlueter published an article in
The Times Literary Supplement of 23 July 2010 describing a manuscript of newly discovered works by Mary Sidney Herbert. Her poetic
epitaph, ascribed to
Ben Jonson but more likely to have been written in an earlier form by the poets
William Browne and her son William, 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. Her literary talents and aforementioned connections to the theater and the royal court have led to her being considered one of the true authors of the works of Shakespeare in the
Shakespeare authorship question. == Ancestry ==