Mary Sidney's Antonius and the Ambiguities of French History
Author: Prescott, Anne Lake1
Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Volume 38, Numbers 1-2, 1 July 2008 , pp. 216-233(18)
Publisher: Modern Humanities Research Association
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Abstract:
Mary Sidney Herbert's translation of Garnier's Marc-Antoine has a trans-Channel context that sharpens and complicates its implications. To remember that Garnier was an official who nevertheless flirted with the radically subversive Holy League and wrote during a three-sided civil war in which definitions of loyalty were in flux adds further poignancy to a play set during Roman civil tumults. Sidney wrote shortly after the assassination of Henri III, a mother-dominated and (it was said) sexually ambiguous murderer whom many in England despised even as they preferred him to the League. Such a background gives Sidney's work additional irony and moral ambiguity.
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