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This chapter discusses the story of Mary Wroth and explains how the dramatic increase in visibility of her story over the last two decades demonstrates the changes that have taken place in the status of early modern women's writing. It stresses that the attention given to Wroth establishes a certain canon of early modern women's writing, which is being challenged by many scholars working in the field. It demonstrates that Wroth is a model of aristocratic, literary writing, in distinction to many early modern women who wrote in non-literary forms and who came from more humble backgrounds. The chapter examines the rewritten lyric poetry created by Mary Wroth. It then evaluates Mary Wroth's enormous prose romance in more detail, particularly the scandal of publishing Urania. It also raises some questions regarding the textual history of Wroth's pastoral play Love's Victory.

Sidney's niece Mary Wroth published a long prose romance, the Urania, in 1621, along with a lyric sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus; a second part of the Urania exists in manuscript. Both works draw deeply on the writings of Wroth's family, with her aunt and father as models as well as her more celebrated uncle. They also thematise questions of family, genealogy, generation, resemblance, memory, recognition, and imitation, to create dense, highly personal texts that narrate and fantasise about Wroth's life at the same time as they offer a revisionary rereading of Sidney's own writings and literary values. Sidneian dialogue in Wroth's hands becomes a one-sided monologue of apostrophe in her sonnets, and in the rhetoric of her sonneteering lover, Pamphilia, who figures Wroth herself and is also the central character within the Urania. Both parts of the Urania develop and radically reconceive the Arcadia's rhetoric and plot logic of incompletion and aposiopesis; both parts end, like the Arcadia, in mid-sentence.

Chapter Five argues that like Shakespeare, Mary Wroth is concerned with the practical limits of resistance theory, but she returns to an Elizabethan focus on the psychological dimensions of these limits. Yet Wroth’s Urania offers a more perverse view of power than the Sidneian or Spenserian romances to which it alludes. Wroth was a member of a court circle who opposed many of James I’s policies even as they depended on monarchal favor. For Wroth, it is not that subjects are too weak or self-deceiving to fight tyranny. Rather, because the Urania pictures love in Petrarchan terms that are consciously masochistic, Wroth warns that subjects may put up with tyranny because they actually enjoy it. This romance warns of the dangerous private and public effects of such obsessive devotion. But Wroth also acknowledges the allure of erotic martyrdom—a stance that emerges in her relentless portraits of women betrayed, degraded, and tortured by men they love.

In this chapter I argue that Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania signals the enduring legacy and triumphant return of constant women as the cornerstone of the Sidney alliance and its mode of political critique. Rather than a personal roman-a-clef, I see the Urania as a sustained romanticization of the unions of states in the service of a larger political cause: the “Holy Roman Empire” as a figure for the international Protestant cause. Deploying a genre rife with clandestine literary operations to offer advice to the man most associated with a “clandestine opposition” within James’ Privy Council—her cousin and lover William Herbert—Wroth endeavored to ensure that he was doing so with sufficient constancy. In ciphering these contexts so explicitly, Wroth identified herself and her romance with the workings of oppositional statecraft, and thus with the political humanism for which the Sidneys were known.

This chapter argues that whereas in modern thought secularism appears the only route to challenging lifelong monogamous marriage, the early modern writers John Milton, Philip Sidney, and Mary Wroth base their endorsement of divorce and adultery on the Pauline distinction between duty and love, letter and spirit. Milton’s divorce pamphlets and Sidney’s and Wroth’s sonnet sequences presume that any given commitment may turn out to be a mistake, so intimacy is inevitably provisional. In their emphasis on interiority, these writers participate in a cultural project of privatizing love, which scholars have rightly seen as an ideological foundation of heteronormativity, capitalism, and neoliberalism. Yet by taking this privatization to its logical extreme, they provide grounds for removing intimacy from institutional regulation and reward altogether. These writings are useful to modern queer thought not just as positive models, but also because they alert us to the exclusions upon which freedom may be premised. Sidney, Wroth, and Milton are part of the longer history that precedes and conditions present queer associations of secularism with Western reason and modernity, religion with superstitious and oppressive non-Western cultures. The ideal of sexual liberation, no less than those of monogamy and marriage, has its own racialized genealogy.

Although not every lyric produced in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England was intended to be sung, unpacking the musical facets of lyric circulation holds tremendous implications for our understanding of the performance-based facets of early modern poetics. In confronting these questions, this chapter takes as its focus the literary–musical nexus of the Sidney circle and, in particular, the writings of Mary Wroth, an accomplished musician whose writings abound with musical lyrics and allusions to song performance. Focusing on the manuscript collection of Wroth’s poems now preserved at the Folger Shakespeare Library and on the songs scattered throughout Urania, this chapter considers how reading Wroth’s songs as songs—as metrical compositions written with a tune in mind, adapted for musical setting and performance, or simply meant to be imagined as sung—sheds new light on the affective impact of the musical moments in her writings.

This chapter looks at materiality in works where allegory seemed mostly abstraction. It considers allegory in the Renaissance by focusing on Christine de Pizan's City of Ladies and the way in which she literalizes the metaphor of her literary work. It discusses the long-standing debate over the typically female gender of personifications and allegorical figures as materially and not merely metaphorically (or linguistically) gendered. The chapter situates Christine de Pizan and Mary Wroth in a distinctive relationship against and within the patriarchal tradition of allegory. Clearly empowered by the gendered forces contending within the allegorical figure of personification, both writers revisit its violent workings to provide forceful narratives about the agency of women.

This chapter illuminates the affective significance of music and song within household drama, a genre that early modern scholarship has found difficult to detach from the page and that continues to be undervalued in performance terms. Drawing on the notion of the closet, understood both as an architectural and acoustic space within the early modern household and as a generic marker for women’s dramatic productions, it explores the range of musical practices encompassed under the broad category of “household plays.” Focusing on Jane Lumley’s Iphigenia at Aulis, Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, and Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory, it then considers how recent staging experiments help to illuminate textual markers of music and song that have too often been silenced.

Following a set of characters who travel through the Urania while conspicuously withholding the names of their love objects, chapter six argues that periphrasis, that figure of speech which names an object by talking around that object, models a peculiar form of possession: Periphrasis is the figure that permits characters to maintain their grasp on precisely that which they do not have. While Wroth’s readers have tended to read her romance as a roman à clef, this chapter suggests that the Urania’s orientation towards history does not take the form of a topical allegory but a circumlocution. Periphrasis becomes the instrument by which Wroth’s fictional world brings about precisely that which history denied.

Wonder, which was always at the heart of romance, came under attack in the first decades of the seventeenth century, and the nature of imaginative fiction changed. Yet, Don Quixote (the two parts of which were printed in 1605 and 1615) shows that the wonder was not eliminated under the pressures of fact in the fictions of the early seventeenth century; it simply resurfaced in other forms. Two texts roughly contemporaneous with Don Quixote’s appearance in England illustrate the nature of that metamorphosis: Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and the manuscript continuation of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania. This chapter examines the self-conscious use of the implausible and the improbable that both texts display, and argues that the wrinkles and flaws that Shakespeare and Wroth insist on displaying in their texts are integral to the metamorphosis of wonder itself.

Reading Amadis in Jacobean England was conditioned by two publishing events: the appearance of the first part of Cervantes’s Don Quixote in 1605, and Munday’s 1618–19 edition of the first four books of Amadis. The revived Jacobean currency of the romance, alongside its association with Ovid and Sidney’s Arcadia as ‘arts of the heart’, explains its appearance in plays by Jacobean and Caroline dramatists including Jonson, Dekker, Massinger, Beaumont, Shirley, Brome, and Davenant. The second half of the chapter examines Amadis as the palimpsest upon which Don Quixote was written and highlights the theme of ‘ravery’ that links Amadis and Don Quixote, drawing examples from the satirical modes in which this topic is played out. This chapter therefore opens up a rich seam of literary allusion and parody that has not previously been studied, as well as shedding new light on the mechanics of reading Don Quixote in England.

Chapter three examines how artifice at its most conspicuous assigns an original set of values to the people and objects that populate imaginative worlds. Attending to the work of the epithet in Mary Wroth’s Urania, I argue that an indecorous poetics—one that manufactures stylistic surplus and excess—actively revises traditional hierarchies of value in order to generate an imaginative world that revels in the superlative degree. It may be, as Demetrius suggested in On Style, that using figures of speech to describe a wobbling teacup produces an indecorous alignment of words to things but such a use also distinguishes imaginative realms and their alternative constructions of possibility.

This chapter develops a sociological account of the emergence of the literary ‘career’ in which composing literature becomes legible as a social role that brings status and recognition in its own right. The key change that makes this possible is the emergence of a new social function for English literature, namely, to confer upon readers a distinctive cultural status based on their taste and cultural refinement. This ‘cultural capital’ is based on readers’ ability conspicuously to consume and produce a super-literary language that is differentiated from ordinary uses of language. This cultural capital comes to supplement other more traditional early modern forms of status, being an aristocrat or possessing wealth or being of the masculine gender. The chapter explores how this phenomenon is affected by the gender and class position of a variety of authors including Wyatt, Surrey, Shakespeare, Spenser, Whitney, Lanyer, Wroth, and Jonson.