Ben Jonson, Mary Sidney and the Shakespeare First Folio:
Reade, in their vertuous parents noble parts,
The mysteries of manners, armes, and arts.
Ben Jonson, To Penshurst
If Ben Jonson really intended readers to discover that Mary Sidney was the virtuous parent of the plays of William Shakespeare whose noble parts teach the ‘mysteries of manners armes and arts’, as the Horacian anagrams in the poem suggest, we would expect to find a confirmation in the preface materials of the Shakespeare First Folio, which are believed to be almost entirely the work of Jonson. But first, it will be helpful to review the circumstances surrounding Jonson and the Sidney/Herbert families leading up to the production of the folio.
When Jonson published his complete works in 1616, Robert Sidney and his Herbert nephews were in the ascendancy in English politics. Out of favour with the crown during the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, their fortunes had improved with James. Mary Sidney’s younger son, Philip Herbert, was one of the Scottish king’s first favourites, gaining the Earldom of Montgomery upon his marriage to Susan de Vere as his reward. His brother William, heir to the Pembroke title, emerged from his disreputable youth as a leader of Parliament, and married a Talbot heiress. Robert Sidney, driven near to bankruptcy as Governor of Flushing in the Netherlands under Elizabeth, was raised to Baron on the accension of James and appointed Chamberlain of the Queen’s household. In 1605 he was named Viscount Lisle and in 1616 joined Philip and James as a Knight of the Garter. Finally in 1618 he was granted the Earldom of Leicester, his uncle’s title he could not inherit through his mother (Robert was the only surviving legitimate grandson of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland and therefore heir to both Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester). However, through the first decade of James’ rule real power lay with others, first Robert Cecil, son of the great Lord Treasurer who ran the government for Elizabeth, and then royal favourite Robert Carr. When Carr forced an ignominious divorce on the young Earl of Essex (on grounds of being unable to perform marital duties) so that Carr could himself marry Essex’ wife (Francis Howard) and the two then conspired to murder Carr’s secretary in the Tower of London, the scandal left a vacuum William Herbert was perfectly positioned to fill. The brothers promoted an attractive young dance master, George Villiers, to occupy the King’s fickle attention, and in December 1515, the grateful monarch made William Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Household, giving him effective control of the country[1].
Mary Sidney engraved by Simon Passe 1618
Their new prominence was captured by the artists of the period. During 1617-18 several of the members of the extended Sidney-Herbert clan sat for portrait engravings by various artists of the Van de Passe family. Mary’s 1618 portrait by Simon de Passe shows her as an author, holding a book and adorned with laurel leaves. Her collar contains lace monograms of the letters WS in the form of swans. In a 2009 article, Michael Brennan notes “there is no evidence that it was ever included as a standard illustration in a contemporary printed volume.” and speculates that the addition of David’s Psalms, “clearly (but with little regard for verisimilitude) added in black lettering across the top edge of the book” might indicate it was commissioned for a collection of her works and repurposed for a hoped-for edition of the Psalms[2].
The dowager countess had spent much of her time from 1614 to 1616 “shooting pistols, taking tobacco, dancing, singing and playing cards” at Spa in Belgium with her attractive younger physician companion Matthew Lister[3]. She returned late in the decade to build a much-admired country house of her own at Houghton, where she hosted King James in July 1621. Shortly after the king’s visit she moved to a city home on Aldersgate St a few steps from the print shop of William Jaggard, in the north of London. Mary’s niece Mary Sidney Wroth was also in London, arranging for the publication of her prose romance, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, the first known written by an English woman.
On September 25, 1621, Mary Sidney died in her London home, a victim of smallpox. She was a month shy of her 60th birthday[4]. Shortly after, Wroth’s book was released, identifying the author as “niece to the most excellent Lady Mary Countess of Pembroke, late deceased.” Urania caused an instant scandal, suspected of being a roman a clef for gossip of court life, it was immediately condemned by those who believed they were caricatured negatively. Particularly aggrieved was Sir Edward Denny. Denny was a neighbour to the Wroth’s in Essex who believed one tale in particular revealed unflattering details about his family. He responded by circulating a vituperative poem about Wroth in which he called her “a hermaphrodite in show, in deed a monster”
condemning her for transgressing the natural limits of her gender and urging her to restrict her efforts to translating psalms like her aunt[5].
Within a month or so of publication Wroth’s book was withdrawn from public sale. Whatever the merits of Denny’s complaint, Wroth risked exposing a secret that threatened her powerful cousin, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. William and the widowed Mary were having an affair which would soon produce two children[6]. William’s political situation had become tenuous; the dance master that he had promoted had advanced beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, and, as the now Duke of Buckingham, was encouraging James’ hopes for a Spanish match for his heir, Charles. James hoped to unite the Protestant and Catholic ruling families of Europe and put an end to the religious strife that had riven the continent since the time of Henry VIII. Still the protestant champion in the mould of his uncle, William led opposition to the marriage plans which gained renewed life with the death of Philip III of Spain. Buckingham and Prince Charles travelled incognito to Spain in Spring of 1623, only to find that the Spanish never seriously considered the marriage and believed the Pope would not grant a dispensation for the Infanta to marry a protestant in any event. By early 1624 they had come to understand that the Spanish viewed them as ludicrous figures. They returned to England hot for war with Spain to salve their embarrassment. Until then however, Pembroke was at risk and could ill afford a scandal involving his family.
Meanwhile, in the fall of 1621, as Mary Wroth was publishing Urania, the scribe for the King’s men, Ralph Crane, produced “fair” copies of five plays, four of them previously unpublished: The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure, and a Winter’s Tale. It is believed that he was working from original manuscripts. Although the Folio indicates the plays are published “according to the True Original Copies” only these five were printed from new “fair” texts. A few months after printing began, shortly after Mary Sidney’s death, work on the Folio stopped for months, not resuming until late in 1622, by which time the volume had missed its planned release date (as indicated by a German book fair catalogue)[7].
In the last months of 1623, before the Folio was completed, a fire consumed a portion of Jonson’s office. He lament’s the event in a long, humorous poem, An Execration upon Vulcan published posthumously in 1640. In it he reports the manuscript works lost, which include some of his notebooks, a verse work describing his long walk to Scotland, and an annotated translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica, the work that according to Bellamy holds the instructions for the anagrams Jonson used in his poems about the Sidney family.
When the Shakespeare folio finally reached the public in November 1623, it was prefaced with a curious portrait of the author, a poem addressed To the Reader, which faced the portrait, and a memorial poem for the author, both signed by Ben Jonson. A letter purportedly written by Shakespeare’s fellow actors Hemmings and Condell implored readers to buy the book with phrases from Jonson’s Bartholomew Faire. Their dedicatory epistle (based on Pliny) to the “incomparable paire of brethren” William and Phillip Herbert reminded them they had ‘prosequuted’ both the plays, ‘and their Authour living, with so much favour: we hope, that (they out-living him, and he not having the fate, common with some, to be exequutor to his owne writings) you will use the like indulgence toward them, you have done unto their parent.’ Modern scholars believe it is all the work of Jonson, working at the behest of the Herbert brothers to whom the volume is dedicated.
[1] Adam Nicolson, Quarrel with the King: The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War, Reprint edition (HarperCollins e-books, 2008), 145.
[2] Michael G Brennan, “The Sidney Family and Jacobean Portrait Engravings,” n.d., 15.
[3] Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (Oxford University Press, 1990), 201.
[4] Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix.
[5] Paul Salzman, “Contemporary References in Mary Wroth’s Urania,” The Review of English Studies 29, no. 114 (1978): 179.
[6] Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix, 210.
[7] Edwin Eliott Willoughby, A Printer of Shakespeare (Ardent Media, n.d.).
