Mary Sidney - Assessment

Assessment

Sidney's style emphasises ardour. An example is the death scenes in her closet drama The Tragedy of Antonie (1592), a translation of the French play Marc-Antoine (1578) by Robert Garnier; it was completed in 1590 and first published in 1592. William Shakespeare may have used it as source material for his Antony and Cleopatra (1607). In "The Psalms of David", she describes the pain of an earthly existence in the light of the divine grace. She probably considered the Psalms her literary legacy, although they were not published during in her lifetime. An engraving of her in later years shows her holding them.

Her influence—through literary patronage, through publishing her brother's works and through her own verse forms, dramas, translations and theology (e.g. she translated Philippe de Mornay's Discourse of Life and Death —cannot be easily quantified.

Her poetic epitaph, which is ascribed to Ben Jonson but which is more likely to have been written in an earlier form by poets William Browne and William Herbert (Mary's son), 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.

Mary, Countess of Pembroke is regarded as one of the most gifted women writers of the English Renaissance, much praised on her death by many, including the poetess Aemilia Lanier. She was the aunt of the poetess Lady Mary Wroth (the daughter of her brother, Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester). She also influenced the religious writing of the poet George Herbert (her sons' first cousin).

On account of her literary talents and aforementioned family connections to Shakespeare, she is one of the writers who have been claimed as possible authors of the works of William Shakespeare in the Shakespeare authorship question.