The Gendered Fabric of Poetry: Clothing the Text in the Work of Mary and Philip Sidney

Abstract

Both Mary and Philip Sidney describe the poetic text as “embodied” – and not only a body, but a clothed body. Through textile metaphors and references to the arts of weaving and embroidering, Mary Sidney’s dedicatory poem “Even now that care” and her brother’s Defence of Poesy insist on the materiality of the written word in multiple senses. This paper explores how the fabric of poetry and its different layers, as imagined by the Sidneys, contributes to an understanding of the role, as well as the gendered representation, of the poet – and of the translator. In this context, the Sidney’s joint translation of the Psalms, completed by Mary after her brother’s death, provides a detailed perspective on the status of the translated text, dressed, as it were, in new clothes.