Early Modern England Encyclopedia: Mary Sidney Herbert

Mary Sidney Herbert

Biography

Para1Mary Sidney Herbert, countess of Pembroke (1561–1621) was educated along with her famous brother, the poet Sir Phillip Sidney. Both studied scripture, rhetoric, and languages including Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Mary was the middle child of seven in a family of courtiers. Her father served Queen Elizabeth I as Lord Deputy of Ireland; her mother was a close friend of the Queen,for whom she cared during Elizabeth I’s severe bout of smallpox in 1568, leaving the Queen heavily scarred and afterwards reclusive. Prior to marriage, Mary Sidney Herbert also served at the court of Queen Elizabeth I starting at age 13. At age 15, she became the third wife of Henry Herbert, second earl of Pembroke. As his wife, she raised four children at Wilton House, near Salisbury, while pursuing her own writing and supporting many of the artists of her time. Mary Sidney Herbert died from smallpox in 1621 and is buried next to her husband in Salisbury Cathedral.

Writer and Translator

Para2Mary Sidney Herbert both translated works from French and wrote original religious poetry. From French, she translated Robert Garnier’s tragedy Marc Antoine into blank verse in English as Antoninus. From Italian, she translated the early Renaissance poet Petrarch’s Triumph of Death, using the rhyme scheme in English which he was famous for in Italian.

Para3She and Sir Phillip collaborated on a translation of the Psalms, which she finished on her own after his death in 1586. He had completed 1–43 and she finished the remaining 107 as adaptations of the original poems (rather than metrical translations) using a huge range of English poetic techniques and weaving in contemporary political and cultural concerns. Her work strongly influenced the religious poets of the 17th century such as John Donne and William Herbert (no relation). Poet John Donne praised the Sydnean Pslams, as poems that tell us why and teach us how to sing. The volume of Psalms was presented to Queen Elizabeth in 1601, but it was not printed.

Para4Here are the first four stanzas of her Psalm 52:

Tyrant, why swell’st thou thus,

Of mischief vaunting?

Since help from God to us

Is never wanting.

Lewd lies thy tongue contrives,

Loud lies it soundeth;

Sharper than sharpest knives

With lies it woundeth.

Falsehood thy wit approves,

All truth rejected:

Thy will all vices loves,

Virtue neglected.

Not words from cursed thee,

But gulfs are poured;

Gulfs wherein daily be

Good men devoured.

Para5Herbert was the first woman in England who received fame as a poet. In her time, she was more well known for her translations, likely because translation was viewed as a more suitable form of literary production for women. Most of her poetry went largely unpublished despite its quality, although it did circulate extensively in manuscript, as John Donne’s comment indicates. Her renown as a poet was assisted by her high status and favor at court.

Patron of the Arts

Para6Mary Sidney Herbert frequently invited poets and writers to the family’s estate. She established the first Continental style literary salon in England—an elite space dedicated to the promotion and discussion of literature and writers whom she and her husband supported as patrons. However, there is no evidence that she was involved with the theater or with William Shakespeare. Her sons, however, were the brothers to whom Shakespeare’s First Folio was dedicated when it was published in 1623.

Para7In addition to inspiring and supervising the publication of her brother’s prose romance—the full title of which is The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia—she was the patron to such poets as Francis Meres, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Nicholas Breton, Thomas Nashe, and Samuel Daniel.

Para8She was a dedicatee of a large number of literary works in the period, including Aemelia Lanyer’s 1611 poem, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, one of the first pieces of original poetry by a female English poet. Herbert’s niece and namesake, Mary Sidney Wroth, went on to write and publish poetry in the 1620s, including a collection of sonnets and a prose romance.

Key Print Sources

Hannay, Margaret P. Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. Oxford University Press, 1990.

Stableford, Brian. Mary Sidney Herbert. Guide to Literary Masters & Their Works. Salem Press, 2007

Key Online Sources

Greenberg, Eliana. Mary Sidney. Project Continua. https://www.projectcontinua.org/mary-sidney/. Accessed 30 Jun. 2024.

Hannay, Margaret Patterson. Herbert née Sidney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke (1561–1621), Writer and Literary Patron. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 3 Jan. 2008. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/13040.

Hannay, Margaret P. Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. The Sidney Homepage—Biography of the Countess of Pembroke. Cambridge University, 2000. https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/sidney/pembroke_biography.htm.

The Sidney Psalms and Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. Trinity College Library. 8 Mar. 2017. https://trinitycollegelibrarycambridge.wordpress.com/2019/03/08/the-sidney-psalms-and-mary-herbert-countess-of-pembroke/.

Prosopography

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Katelyn Ekker

Katelyn Ekker was an Honors student at Utah Valley University.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title	Mary Sidney Herbert
Type of text	Critical
Publisher	University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series	Early Modern England Encyclopedia
Source	By Katelyn Ekker and Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration	This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition	Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
Sponsor(s)	Early Modern England Encyclopedia Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
Encoding description	Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status	published
Funder(s)	Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University
License/availability	Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.