Mary Herbert, countess of Pembroke

Table of Contents

Introduction References & Edit History Quick Facts & Related Topics

Images

Mary Herbert, countess of Pembroke

English translator

Also known as: Mary Sidney

Written and fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Article History

Quick Facts

Née:: Mary Sidney

Born:: Oct. 27, 1561, near Bewdley, Worcestershire, Eng.

Died:: Sept. 25, 1621, London (aged 59)

See all related content

Mary Herbert, countess of Pembroke (born Oct. 27, 1561, near Bewdley, Worcestershire, Eng.—died Sept. 25, 1621, London) was a patron of the arts and scholarship, poet, and translator. She was the sister of Sir Philip Sidney, who dedicated to her his Arcadia. After his death she published it and completed his verse translation of the Psalms.

In 1575 Queen Elizabeth I invited Mary to court, promising “a speciall care” of her. Two years later Mary wed Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, and lived mainly at Wilton House, near Salisbury, Wiltshire. Their sons, William and Philip, were the “incomparable pair of brethren” to whom William Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623) was dedicated.

Among those who praised her for her patronage of poetry was Edmund Spenser, who dedicated his Ruines of Time to her, and Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, and John Davies. A lutanist, she inspired Thomas Morley’s dedication of Canzonets (1593); and, in his dedication to her of Pilgrimage to Paradise (1592), Nicholas Breton likened her to the Duchess of Urbino, patron in an earlier time to Baldassare Castiglione. Lady Pembroke ranked after the queen as the most admired of Elizabethan femmes savantes.

4:043 Dickinson, Emily: A Life of Letters, This is my letter to the world/That never wrote to me; I'll tell you how the Sun Rose/A Ribbon at a time; Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul

Britannica Quiz

Famous Poets and Poetic Form

Lady Pembroke translated Robert Garnier’s tragedy Marc-Antoine and Philippe Duplessis-Mornay’s Discours de la vie et de la mort (both 1592) and elegantly rendered Petrarch’s Trionfo della morte into terza rima. Modern criticism recognizes her as one of the most significant female poets of the English Renaissance.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Elizabethan literature

Table of Contents

Introduction References & Edit History Related Topics

Images

Elizabethan literature

English literature

Written and fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Article History

Key People:: Edward Arber; Francis Meres

Related Topics:: English literature

See all related content

Elizabethan literature, body of works written during the reign of Elizabeth I of England (1558–1603), probably the most splendid age in the history of English literature, during which such writers as Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Roger Ascham, Richard Hooker, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare flourished. The epithet Elizabethan is merely a chronological reference and does not describe any special characteristic of the writing.

The Elizabethan age saw the flowering of poetry (the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, dramatic blank verse), was a golden age of drama (especially for the plays of Shakespeare), and inspired a wide variety of splendid prose (from historical chronicles, versions of the Holy Scriptures, pamphlets, and literary criticism to the first English novels). From about the beginning of the 17th century a sudden darkening of tone became noticeable in most forms of literary expression, especially in drama, and the change more or less coincided with the death of Elizabeth. English literature from 1603 to 1625 is properly called Jacobean, after the new monarch, James I. But, insofar as 16th-century themes and patterns were carried over into the 17th century, the writing from the earlier part of his reign, at least, is sometimes referred to by the amalgam “Jacobethan.”

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Augustyn.