H erbert, M ary ( S idney), Countess of P embroke

Abstract

Mary Sidney Herbert (1561–1621) is listed by John Bodenham in his verse miscellany Bel‐vedere (1600) – along with Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare – as one of the notable writers of his time. Herbert's 1592 translation of Robert Garnier's Marc Antoine was the first dramatic rendering of the Antony and Cleopatra story in English, and the influence of her Antonius upon a revived interest in soliloquy predicated upon classical models is widely acknowledged. Her lyric transcription of the Psalms, however, is the principal source of her poetic reputation, then and now. Writers of the period who commend Herbert's verse psalms include Samuel Daniel, John Davies, John Donne, Michael Drayton, Sir John Harington, Ben Jonson, Aemelia Lanyer, and Thomas Moffett. The impress of the psalter translation is in evidence in the contemporary devotional lyric compositions of Barnabe Barnes, Nicholas Breton, Henry Constable, Francis Davison, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, and Abraham Fraunce – and its influence upon 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 seventeenth‐century devotional lyric (Martz 1954; Hamlin 2004; Coles 2008).