6 - The Sidney Circle

Summary

MARY SIDNEY

As we have already seen, Mary Sidney played a vital role in both preparing authorized versions of her brother's major works and shaping his posthumous reputation as a literary and cultural authority. Critics have also increasingly focused their attention not only on Mary's own writings but on how she fashions a literary reputation for herself. The notion of female authorship in early modern England was immensely problematic and challenged the traditional formulation, drawn from contemporary models of female conduct, that women should be chaste, silent and obedient. Unrestrained female speech, and by implication unchecked expression in writing and print, was particularly associated with sexual forwardness and impropriety. Despite their more progressive stance towards the female intellect, sixteenth-century humanists such as Juan Luis Vives and Sir Thomas More, together with numerous contemporary Reformist authorities, had written extensively on the virtues of female silence and passivity, and had established that a woman's sole preserve was the domestic sphere. Silence coupled with obedience to one's husband within the household was supported by St Paul's frequently evoked exhortation against women speaking in church in 1 Corinthians 14:34-5. This was amplified in the authorized ‘Homily on the state of Matrimony in the second Anglican Book of Homilies (1562-3). With the exception of works on devotional subjects, original compositions by women were constrained by the prevailing injunctions against female speech and the attendant view that any such writing lacked legitimacy. The concept of female authorship itself was thus inherently undermined by the questionable status of female authority as a whole.

But the world of letters was not as exclusively male as such a social milieu might suggest, and a number of different ‘auxiliary’ literary roles have been identified through which early modern women began both to wield a certain amount of control and influence and to develop further strategies of legitimation. Patronage was one way in which royal and aristocratic women might have their names put to a work, usually through dedications and addresses, and exercise a level of benevolent power to make a work possible through providing material reward or employment. Translation also provided a means of establishing a legitimate form of writing project for women writers, for through the rewriting of an existing text the translator inherently implies an inferiority to, or at very least a lesser degree of agency than the (male) author of the original.