The Triumph of Death and Other Unpublished and Uncollected Poems by Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (1561–1621) ed. by G. F. Waller

Abstract

give his edition considerable authority. Users will unfortunately be frequently forced to return to Clubb’s rich edition for much basic information, which Finnegan has by choice excluded from his own work. Ra y m o n d s t . J a c q u e s / University of Ottawa The Triumph of Death and Other Unpublished and Uncollected Poems by Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (156 1-16 21) * ed. G. F. Waller (Salz­ burg: Institut fur Englische Sprache und Literatur: Universitat Salzburg, 1977). v, 227 As her illustrious brother personifies the Renaissance ideal of the courtier, so Mary, Countess of Pembroke, embodies the idea of the Elizabethan great house, with all its connotations of aristocratic romance and elegantly learned patronage. The loving sister who inspired the Arcadia, the mother of the “incomparable paire of brethren” to whom the First Folio is dedicated, and the patroness of Spenser, Daniel and many others, has certainly earned her fixed epithet of “famous.” But the heavenly gifts and riches of her brave mind, which seemed to Spenser more wonderful and rare because of her sex, were not directed merely to “reincense This sacred fire” (in Daniel’s phrase) in others. When she wished to encourage the ideals of neo-classicism in the drama, she led the way with her translation of Gamier’s Marc-Antoine, which Bullough sees as initiating the courtly Senecan movement, and as a probable influence on Shakespeare. Her task of completing the metrical translation of the Psalms that her brother had carried only a quarter of its way was perhaps undertaken partly from motives of pious affection, but surely also from the promptings of her own talents. The task was far from being one of mechanical turning of a foreign text into a preconceived mould; the Countess continued to work for and to achieve the metrical variety and virtuosity which make the Sidneian Psalms “an Art of English Verse,” as Hallett Smith calls them. It is probably because these two works have in recent years appeared in handsome and readable form (The Tragedy of Antonie in G. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Vol. v [London, 1966]; J. C. A. Rathmell, editor, The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke [New York, 1963]), that the Countess’s own reputation as a poet has been steadily growing. The purpose of Waller’s edition of unpub­ lished and uncollected poems is to foster that reputation by making readily * (This book appears as no. 2798 in the 1977 M LA International Bibliography, Vol. I, under Herbert, M.) 246 accessible the rest of her poetry, leaving only her prose translation of Philippe de Mornay’s Discours de la Vie et de la Mort without a modern edition. The most important contribution of Waller’s volume is the publication of more than thirty psalms in very different versions from those found in the Penshurst manuscript, which is the basis of Rathmell’s edition of the complete Sidneian Psalms. Most of the versions printed by Waller represent early efforts, but one very interesting group of rhymed versions postdates the quantitative versions found in the Penshurst manuscript, perhaps indicating, as Waller suggests, that the Countess had “ reached a definite stage of dis­ satisfaction with the quantitative experiments” (p. 205). Comparison of these versions offers in an intensified degree the fascination of observing how poetic form determines total meaning. Psalm 123 may serve as an example: in the Penshurst version, in elegiacs, the Countess “follows the Latin model closely, and ends the pentameters with disyllables beginning with short, but stressed, syllables” (Derek Attridge, Well-weighed syllables [Cambridge, 1974], p. 204). The effect is dense, measured, weighty. In the later version, lightly tripping cross-rhymed quatrains of iambic trimeter briefly encapsulate separate ideas and images. PSALM 123 AD TE LEV A V I OCULOS M EOS Unto thee, oppressed, thou greate commander of heaven Heav’nly good attending, lift I my earthy seeing Right as a waiters eye on a graceful master is holden; As the look of waitresse fix’d on a lady lieth: Soe with erected face, untill by thy mercy relieved O Lord, expecting, begg we thy frendly favour. Scorn...