ALONE in the midst of a ‘delicate thick wood’, Mary Wroth’s primary protagonist, Pamphilia, throws away a book describing a man’s inconstancy to a woman who loves him. She exclaims:
Poore love … how doth all storyes, and every writer use thee at their pleasure, apparrelling thee according to their various fancies? canst thou suffer thy selfe to be thus put in cloathes, nay raggs instead of vertuous habits? punish such Traytors, and cherrish mee thy loyall subject who will not so much as keepe thy injuries neere me.1
Since Pamphilia’s beloved Amphilanthus will desert her numerous times during this romance, this book is, in a sense, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, and it implicates as well a dense network of creative works—other prose romances, masques, and lyric sequences—which it calls up in other episodes. Pamphilia’s blissful lack of awareness of the role she will play in her own narrative of man’s inconstancy creates a moment of delicious irony within this text. Her decision to reject a book that does not reflect her experience up to that point in the romance brings to the surface a paradigm for a project underlying this highly self-conscious romance: the intersection of what we today would call ‘fiction’ and the lived experience of her contemporaries and especially of herself, evoked through a persistent and sometimes even blatant topicality that yet resists interpretation. Challenging to modern readers, who tend either to ignore contemporary references or else to use them to make unwarranted assumptions, this topical subtext does not offer dependable biographical fact. But it does offer something else: an underlying sense of lived joy and pain, of a deep and personal engagement in this text creating what Meredith Skura has called, in another context, an ‘autobiographical effect’.2
The immediate effect of the topicality of Wroth’s romance was to scandalize contemporaries; their responses, together with a number of self-referential narratives told by characters about themselves, confirm its presence. Most notably, Sir Edward Denny objected to his alleged representation as a character prevented from stabbing his daughter for adultery only by the physical intervention of her husband.3 John Chamberlain notes that for ‘many others’ besides Denny in her romance, Wroth ‘makes bold with, and they say she takes great liberty or rather license to traduce whom she pleases, and thinks she dances in a net’.4 The presence of topicality itself was not unusual by the early seventeenth century. Her uncle Philip Sidney used the letters of his own name for the self-referential figure of the melancholy Philisides in The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Published the same year as Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, Alexander Barclay’s romance Argenis was explicitly topical and a key interpreting biographical referents was appended to a later edition. But the primary function of Wroth’s topical subtext was much more ambitious than the creation of scandal or employing a contemporary literary device. Throughout Wroth’s romance, and in particular in the Pamphilia–Amphilanthus narrative and in the three enchantments that structure the portion published in 1621 (here called the First Part), Wroth evokes this autobiographical effect to explore the limits of the genre of romance. In the process, as discussed below, she also implicates the kinds of self-reference common to lyrics and masques. The innovative contribution of Wroth’s romance to early modern prose fiction is her use of the underlying subtext of topicality to test what we would now call fiction for a form of emotional ‘truth’. The result is a sophisticated meditation on the value of fiction, grounded in a profound and personal engagement with the chaotic passions at its core.
In 1621 the first of two parts of Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania appeared in the bookshops of London; the second part was to remain unpublished until 1999. Appearing without the traditional front matter such as a dedicatory epistle from the author, it is not clear whether the 1621 portion of her romance was published without Wroth’s approval or if she only wished it to seem so as a mode of self-protection. Taken together, these two parts compose a romance of almost 600,000 words, an immense text even for a genre characterized by long works. Moreover, as the first extant romance written by an Englishwoman, it represents a landmark in the history of English prose. Wroth’s romance was only one of several firsts for Mary Wroth. Appended to the printed portion of her romance was a sonnet sequence ‘Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’, the first secular sonnet sequence written by an Englishwoman. First published in 1988, her play Love’s Victory is the first original play known to be written by an Englishwoman. For these ‘firsts’ and, even more, for the high quality of her writing, Mary Wroth is now established as a canonical figure from the early modern period; her work is well known to specialists and to students alike.5
This rise to visibility is surprisingly recent. Mary Wroth’s work was largely inaccessible to most readers until the late 1980s. It was not until 1995 that the first complete edition of her romance printed in 1621 appeared, without the originally appended sonnet sequence, as The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania; her manuscript continuation appeared in 1999 as The Second Part of the Countess of Pembroke’s Urania.6 Wroth was one of several early modern women writers whose works surfaced in the 1980s, when an active interest in women’s writing caused their texts to be rediscovered and newly valued. Before that, a regrettable tendency to dismiss women’s writing was evident in comments by the few critics who read Wroth’s romance, however cursorily: it was said to lack underlying meaning; it was described as a derivative imitation of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, the romance written by her uncle, Sir Philip Sidney.7
In her own time, as well, Wroth’s romance met some heavy opposition, in addition to objections to topical references. Writing a romance in the early seventeenth century was a courageous act of female authorship. When Sir Edmund Denny criticized Wroth for writing a work composed of ‘lascivious tales and amorous toys’ instead of the ‘heavenly lays and holy love’ written by her aunt, the Countess of Pembroke, 8 he was drawing from a widespread cultural stereotype of the eroticized woman reader of romance imagined as indulging herself in the amorous passions of fictional lovers. While book inventories, as well as allusions by such writers as Shakespeare, demonstrate that men were also avid readers of romance, this fantasy characterized romance and the woman reader alike as frivolous and suspiciously (or delightfully?) sexual.9 Rather than denying the sexuality of the woman reader (and writer) of romance, Wroth capitalized on it by foregrounding the desires of her primary protagonist, Pamphilia, for her inconstant beloved Amphilanthus. The result was far from frivolous. Through the pain and intermittent pleasures of Pamphilia’s constant love for Amphilanthus, Wroth’s romance creates a highly developed portrait of the desiring female subject. Even more audaciously, in what Helen Hackett has called her most ‘radical intervention’ in the genre of romance, Wroth identified this desiring subject as, in some sense, a version of herself; and scholars have similarly noted that striking parallels between the character Amphilanthus and William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, to whom she bore two children, indicate a ‘shadowing’ or a ‘mirror’, although not a consistent one-to-one correspondence.10
While numerous events cannot be taken as reliably factual, the sense of an underlying and very personal context yet exerts a pressure to recognize Wroth romance as something more than a fiction. But it is not biography, either. Topical referents typically evoke a play of signification open to various possibilities, a shadowy space between fiction and biography that is not quite either one.11 As Margaret Hannay has pointed out, sometimes an incident presenting reliable topical markers will then veer off into sheer fantasy.12 Such topical markers include anagrams of names and references to known events. Several characters indicate the presence of topical meanings in their own self-referential narratives. When Pamphilia inadvertently slips into a first-person pronoun, it becomes clear to her listener, Dorolina, that her narrative of Lindamira refers to herself. Some details in Pamphilia’s tale also invoke an awareness of Mary Wroth’s life. The name of Lindamira’s father, Bersindor, is a near-anagram of Wroth’s father, Robert Sidney; like Bersindor, Robert Sidney married ‘a great heir in little Brittany’, or Wroth’s mother, the Welsh heiress Barbara Gamage. Details such as these create the ‘fierce desire for decoding’ that is a deliberate operation of a topical text.13 But what can be made of Lindamira’s fall from the favour of the Queen, angered by rumours of Lindamira’s love for her own favourite? No solid evidence exists for such a falling out between Wroth and Queen Anne;14 it may never have happened, or perhaps it was later glossed over. We will never know. Dorolina discreetly withholds comment, yet understands that this tale is ‘something more exactly related then a fixion’ (First Part, 505).
To consider the topical subtext underlying the Urania, a brief survey of the lives of Mary Wroth and William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, is in order.15 Around 1587, Mary Sidney (later Wroth) was born to an unusually literary family. Deceased before her birth, her uncle, Philip Sidney, wrote the epic romance, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, whose title is echoed by Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. Her aunt, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, to whom she was very close, modelled female authorship in her edition of Philip Sidney’s romance and her translations of Psalms and the plays of Robert Garnier. In 1604, at the age of seventeen, Mary Sidney married Sir Robert Wroth. Several indications suggest that the marriage did not begin happily. Ben Jonson observed that ‘my Lady Wroth is unworthily married on a jealous husband’.16 However, by the time of her husband’s death in 1614, one month after the birth of their only son James, the couple seem to have reconciled their differences. Mary Wroth was left with an estate burdened by debts, rendered even more burdensome when the death of their son in 1616 caused extensive properties to be transferred to the next male heir, Sir Robert’s brother. It was apparently between 1616 and the mid-1620s that Wroth wrote The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania and her play Love’s Victory, as well as revising her sonnet sequence, ‘Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’. During this time she engaged in a sexual relationship with William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, to whom she bore two children, William and Katherine, probably around 1624. Pembroke made no mention of these children, in his will or elsewhere. After Pembroke’s death, his brother Philip, however, did take an active interest in promoting the career of young William; and he may have played a role in the advantageous marriages of Wroth’s daughter Katherine.17 Little is known of Mary Wroth’s life during the tumultuous time of the Civil War. Mary Wroth died around 1651.
Born in 1580 to Mary Sidney Herbert and her husband Henry, the second Earl of Pembroke, William Herbert would have known his cousin from childhood.18 Through much of his life, this third Earl of Pembroke attained some notoriety for his amorous relationships. In 1601 he impregnated one of Queen Elizabeth’s maids of honour and refused to marry her. His marriage to Lady Mary Talbot, daughter to the wealthy Earl of Shrewsbury, in 1604 was rumoured to be unhappy; the Earl of Clarendon was to remark that Pembroke had ‘paid much too dear for his wife’s fortune by taking her person into the bargain’.19 According to Clarendon, Pembroke continued to be attracted to women who displayed ‘advantages of the mind as manifested in extraordinary wit and spirit and knowledge, and … great pleasure in conversation’. Like Mary Wroth, he was an accomplished poet. He was an active patron to Ben Jonson; he and his brother Philip were the dedicatees of the first folio of William Shakespeare’s plays. Pembroke rose to prominence in the court of King James, who appointed him Lord Chamberlain in 1615. Pembroke was a powerful advocate for the cause of international Protestantism. During the reign of Charles, he served as Lord Steward of the Royal Household, while consolidating powerful connections in Parliament. Following a pleasant dinner at the house of Christiana, Countess of Devonshire, he died in 1630.
Wroth implicates herself and Pembroke in the narrative of the various separations and reunions between Pamphilia and Amphilanthus overarching the formidable array of plots occupying both parts of the Urania. When Pamphilia first falls in love with her cousin Amphilanthus, he is involved with her friend Antissia. While as ‘the valiantest knight’ he joins Pamphilia, as ‘the loyalest lady’, to resolve the enchantment of the Throne of Love, they only acknowledge their love for each other later, after he reads her poetry. When Pamphilia is enclosed in a second enchantment of the Theater, Amphilanthus recommences a relationship with a former beloved, Musalina, before he, too, is confined in the Theater. He renews his amorous relationship with Pamphilia when he rescues her country from the forces of the King of Celicia. They are parted again when they each believe the other is enclosed in the third enchantment of the Hell of Deceit, to find each other again at the end of the First Part. In the Second Part, they exchange vows before witnesses in a de praesenti marriage, described as ‘nott as an absolute mariage’ (45). Then, falsely informed by his former tutor, Forsandurus, of a betrothal of Pamphilia to Rodomandro, King of Tartaria, Amphilanthus marries the young princess of Slavonia, who he then sends away. Since Amphilanthus is married, Pamphilia then accepts Rodomandro’s proposal. When Forsandurus confesses his treachery on his deathbed, Amphilanthus is reconciled with Pamphilia and also becomes friends with her husband. After restoring order in the countries of Pamphilia and Tartaria, Amphilanthus spends happy time with Pamphilia and Rodomandro in Tartaria. A flash forward reveals that Rodomandro will die, leaving Pamphilia as the mother of a young son, who will also die. Meanwhile, the three friends embark on a journey. They are informed that their adventure, and presumably the narrative itself, cannot continue until Amphilanthus is united with the young knight Fair Design. Named for a cipher on his heart, Fair Design does not know who his father is; the affection Amphilanthus has shown for Fair Design suggests that he will be revealed to be his father. But this revelation does not happen. The text ends mid-sentence after Amphilanthus enquires about the welfare of Fair Design.
The brief flash forward leaving Pamphilia a widow and then the mother of a deceased son provides a parallel to Wroth’s life. Various questions rise forcibly to the surface of this narrative. Was there some kind of understanding between them before their subsequent marriages to other partners? Specifically, was the de praesenti marriage an attempt to suggest, with questionable accuracy, that their offspring were legitimate, as Roberts has proposed?20 The name of Amphilanthus’s tutor, Forsandurus, is an obvious near-anagram for Pembroke’s actual former tutor, Hugh Sanford, who was, in fact, the go-between in the marriage negotiations between Pembroke and Mary Talbot. Did Sanford in fact lie to Pembroke about Mary Sidney’s betrothal? In the romance, Amphilanthus’s marriage occurred before Pamphilia’s; while Mary Sidney was married to Robert Wroth shortly before, rather than after Pembroke’s marriage. But a more compelling impediment than Sanford’s possible duplicity was the unequal status of the respective families at that time.21 While the Herberts owned vast estates and already wielded influence with James, Robert Sidney had not yet risen to the influence that would create him an earl. Finally, Fair Design’s search for Amphilanthus invites interpretation as expressing Wroth’s desire for Pembroke to make arrangements for his natural son. Her hopes were dashed in 1626, when Pembroke named his nephew Philip as heir to his lands without any mention of their son William.
Underlying these questions, which are finally unanswerable, is a striking autobiographical effect which permeates much of Wroth’s romance: the constant love that Pamphilia, also an inveterate poet, expresses for her very unreliable Amphilanthus circles back to Wroth’s construction of herself as an author and as a lover of Pembroke. The actual state of Wroth’s emotions is, of course, as indeterminate as the existence of a de praesenti marriage. On the level of representation, however, if the psychological pain of a woman’s unrequited love for her inconstant beloved is not sufficiently evident in the Pamphilia narrative, it recurs almost obsessively in other narratives, spreading throughout the romance, including Antissia (and her self-referential history of a lady from Great Brittany), Nereana, Alarina, Elyna, Lady Pastora, Silvarina, the Forest Lady, Pelarina, Lisia, the Lady of the Forest Champion, and especially Lindamira and Bellamira, whose narratives resemble Pamphilia’s own. Jennifer Carrell describes Wroth’s ur-tale in this way: ‘a young woman loves a nobleman with whom she has been raised. At court he falls in love with her, but he is unfaithful, sometimes with a queen. Her tears and her poetry prompt him to return to her briefly before leaving her for another woman.’22 This ur-tale and the constant love it invokes are, of course, in the realm of representation, rather than of sincere self-disclosure. Moreover, the constant love expressed by these women, and the extreme suffering it causes them, is not always portrayed in a positive light. When Pamphilia, for example, descends into a particularly deep depression, her friend Urania, fearful for her life, counsels Pamphilia against constancy as a ‘fruitlesse thing’ (470). As discussed below, the three enchantments successively complicate the romance’s perspective on love, as well as the status of its art in expressing it. Is this love a form of profound subjectivity or a confining enclosure? The architecture of the structures of the enchantments similarly implicates the art of Wroth’s romance in this complex dilemma. The questions that begin with a representation of individual love broaden to reflect forms of subjectivity and of the kinds of fiction through which they are expressed.
The kind of topicality engaged through the Pamphilia plot draws significantly from two other genres, lyric and masque; and both of these provide insights into its operations in this romance. It is as a poet, the author of the sequence ‘Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’, that Wroth most explicitly identifies herself as, in some sense, her own protagonist. This is not to say that the feelings expressed in sonnets, by Wroth or any poet, are necessarily sincere, any more than their works are autobiographical in a straightforward sense. Love may not always be love; as Arthur Marotti has noted, sometimes it is politics.23 But the immediate context for many sonnets, as Ilona Bell has also convincingly claimed, often surrounds a relationship, real or imagined. Drawing on the writings of Kenneth Burke, Bell has asked, what kinds of eventfulness may a poem contain? Does it transact an ‘amorous courtship’?24 Does it deflect or enact a romantic or sexual advance? The ‘I’ of a sonnet creates an autobiographical effect that shifts into the romance as well. In the First Part, Pamphilia’s verses initiate her first amorous encounter with Amphilanthus. Throughout the romance, numerous relationships are transacted through the exchange of poetry. Even for the vengeful Musalina, being a poet was ‘a necessary thing, and as unseparable from a witty lover as love from youth’ (498). The poetry written by the abandoned Bellamira was ‘an exercise mine undoer taught mee’ (386). Pelarina’s inconstant beloved responded only to her topical references, turning down the leaves of the pages on which she wrote poems which ‘hee thought touched, or came too neere, or I imagine so’ (533). Like Wroth, the character Lindamira follows her narrative of unrequited love with a sequence of sonnets and her persona flows seamlessly between prose and poetry.
Masques also engage a form of topicality or self-reference. Aristocratic masquers are not precisely actors; they do not have speaking roles. Their function is instead to perform an idealized version of themselves, an elevation or distillation of the highly theatrical selves they daily perform as courtiers.25 The degree of personal charisma courtiers were able to infuse into their performances potentially increased their individual status at court.26 Moving in harmony, courtiers also affirm the social cohesion of their group. In their practised and highly deliberate physical motions, they naturalize their identity, individually and as a group, as aristocrats. Their power to dispel the forces of chaos in the anti-masque—witches, hags, satyrs—proceeds less from what they do than what they are. In Thomas Campion’s Somerset Masque of 1614, for example, only Bel-Anna (played by Queen Anne) can free the knights from a spell; her action is only to pull off a branch from a tree offered to her by Eternity. In Jonson’s Masque of Queenes, the ‘ugly hell, which flaming beneath, smoked unto the top of the roof’ disappears suddenly, replaced by the House of Fame, from which descend famous queens from the past; special honour is given to ‘Bel-Anna’ or Queen Anne.27 Not only the performers, but the audience is involved in these idealized fictions as well, joining in the final dance that concludes the masque.
As Wroth writes her Urania, she is performing not only her role as a constant lover, but also as an aristocratic Sidney, the literary heir of her famous writer-uncle. This identity is made explicit in the cartouche forming the keystone of the triumphal arch on the title page of the First Part: ‘Daughter to the right Noble Robert Earle of Leicester. And Neece to the ever famous, and renowned Sir Phillips [sic] Sidney knight. And to the most excellent Lady Mary Countesse of Pembroke late deceased’. The aristocratic identity of the author is amply demonstrated in this self-consciously aristocratic work, with its elaborate syntax, the refined sensibilities expressed in its soliloquies and poems, and the sheer numbers of its royal characters. It is suggested on the title page by the elegance of the architecture engraved for the first enchantment of Venus’s Throne of Love, which can only be entered by passing through the three towers of Desire, Love, and Constancy. The lovers entrapped in the first two towers will only be freed when ‘the valiantest knight’ (Amphilanthus) together with ‘the loyallest lady’ (Pamphilia) enter the tower of Constancy. The Palladian proportions of the three towers and the Throne of Love evoke similarly Palladian sets designed for masques by Inigo Jones, 28 at the same time that the gardens and landscaped paths depict a prosperous country estate. Most remarkably, reader-figures at the bottom of the page, to enter the landscape of the first enchantment, are dressed in extravagant masque costumes: the woman wears a high crown-like head-piece with a descending veil and the man wears buskins, an elaborate hat, and a skirt reaching his knees. How is a reader like a masquer? Like masquers, readers are invited to assume a virtual and very aristocratic identity, whatever their actual location in class might be, entering this landscape of the poem, portrayed under the elaborate cartouche as a Sidney–Herbert estate, to perform the role of celebrated visitor or virtual kin.
The text of the first enchantment invokes the genres both of masque and of lyric. When Pamphilia enters the tower of Constancy, ‘Constancy vanished, as metamorphosing herself into her breast’ (169). Pamphilia becomes, for a moment, an allegorical figure for Constancy herself.29 This identification of a masquer, not as playing, but of being an allegorical figure, is very masque-like; and as in a masque, her power is exerted not through difficult actions, but through the mere presence of her person, her charisma. A voice will instruct them to free the prisoners, which they do, and the ‘palace and all’ vanishes, much as masque sets suddenly disappear. This enchantment holds up Pamphilia, and through her, with whatever accuracy, a version of the author she shadows as a model to be emulated by lovers. They are free from the psychological trap of a kind of love ruled by Cupid and Venus because their constant love is not affected by the response of a beloved. They are self-sufficient because their unwavering love is not dependent on whether it is reciprocated or not. The narrator explains this enchantment as more than a fiction, as a lived experience shared with the readers, for this ‘Throne and punishments are daily built in all humane hearts’ (50).
This enchantment before the Throne of Love is not only psychological in nature; it is literary as well. Wroth has invented a new goddess, Constancy, who surpasses Cupid and Venus. This is not to say that the ideal of constant love is original—far from it. But by placing Constancy in a divine pantheon and giving her such surpassing power, Wroth challenges centuries of classical, medieval, and early modern literary traditions that informed the way that love was expressed by actual people. Does the Urania, like the first enchantment, offer a way to move outside and beyond these traditions in its elevation of the constancy of its numerous female lovers, and especially of Pamphilia? Does Wroth’s romance claim to offer a form of freedom from the tyranny of Venus and Cupid? This claim could be arguably supported by her lyric sequence, ‘From Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’, appended to the First Part. Its first sonnet describes her dream vision, in which Venus placed a flaming heart to her breast, while her son Cupid shuts it inside. The ‘I’ of the sonnet concludes with ‘since: O mee: a lover I have binn’.30 In the last poem in the 1621 sequence, the narrator instructs herself to ‘Leave the discource of Venus, and her sunn/To young beeginers’ and to ‘now lett your constancy your honor prove’ (142). The Folger manuscript version, however, plays with several endings.31
In the second enchantment, Constancy is not enough. A critique of the destructive tendency of romances and masques alike to indulge fantasies is levelled in the entrapment of female characters, including Pamphilia, in a magnificent Theater. It is not only a Theater. The letters on its pillars render it also a kind of book; it can be entered only when Pamphilia discovers a key, a term used for topical identifications. Ascending its steps to sit in marble chairs, the women assume the viewing point usually reserved for the king’s throne, where the perspective of masque sets was designed to come most into focus. From here, the women imagine their loves ‘smiling and joying in them’. This was not, however, an entertainment, but a spell. As Julie Campbell notes, they are immobilized, like figures in a masque, until the arrival of ‘the man most loving and most beloved’ (Amphilanthus), himself to be enclosed until the arrival of ‘the sweetest and loveliest creature that poor habits had disguised greatness in’ (Veralinda).32 This enchantment exposes the risks of indulging fantasies by reading romances, as well as by watching masques. Their satisfactions are illusory. While Pamphilia enjoys Amphilanthus’s imaginary love, Musalina is actually seducing him; and Pamphilia will have to endure the knowledge of their alliance when Musalina enters the Theater as his partner. Most evocative of masques are the outlandish costumes worn by a number of women attempting the ‘poor habits’ that had disguised greatness in—as a forest-nymph, as a nun, as a country lass. They are all trapped within the Theater, because their costumes are only assumed. The spell is only resolved with the arrival of Veralinda, whose costume as a shepherdess is not assumed, but ‘real’: raised by shepherds, she does not yet know that she is a princess. When the enchantment is dissolved (the Theater vanishes), she and Urania both read the ‘real’ stories of their lives. Is this what we, as reader/masquers, should also be reading instead of romance? Something more ‘real’—biography perhaps? Or is this a possible function of the topicality within the Urania, to tether itself to ‘real’ lives, like those read by Veralinda and Urania?
The third enchantment of the Hell of Deceit may refer to the ugly Hell that is the setting of the anti-masque of Jonson’s Masque of Queenes, but in this case no House of Fame replaces it. This enchantment implicates Wroth’s own lyric sequence even more strongly. In two complementary, but different episodes, Pamphilia and Amphilanthus each believe that they see the other entrapped within an enclosure beneath a ‘Crowne of mighty stones’ (581). Pamphilia believes she sees Musalina and Lucenia about to raze her name from Amphilanthus’s exposed heart. Amphilanthus believes he sees Pamphilia with his name written on her exposed heart. This phrase ‘Crowne of mighty stones’ strongly evokes Wroth’s ‘crown of sonnets’, in which the last line of a sonnet becomes the first line of the next sonnet in her sequence ‘Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’. Like the Hell of Deceit, this lyric crown represents enclosure, for its first and last lines describe an entrapping labyrinth (‘In this strange labyrinth, how shall I turn?’); and its several references to fire culminate in its penultimate line, ‘So though in Love I fervently do burn’. Rather than the wish fulfilment of the second enchantment, the Hell of Deceit is a nightmare. But, remarkably, this enchantment does not really exist. It is only an illusion perpetrated by Musalina’s ‘devilish art’ to separate Pamphilia and Amphilanthus. Neither Pamphilia nor Amphilanthus are ‘really’ there. Does this enchantment represent Wroth’s lyrics, and perhaps a lyric tradition in general, as in some sense unreal, as a destructive fiction?
By the Second Part, bizarre incidents that apparently have their genesis in the masque genre foreground the unreality of portions of this romance. Cloud engines portraying masquers as suspended in the air were frequently employed in masque sets designed by Inigo Jones, including the Masque of Blackness in which Wroth performed.33 In what surely represents a parody of masque clouds, the Second Part of Wroth’s romance features a cloud machine gone berserk. When lost children are recovered from a giant, a cloud inexplicably descends and takes them away for reasons unknown. When the young Floristello declares his love for Candiana, a cloud suddenly separates them. A sword, armour, and even a horse descend from a cloud to equip Fair Design as a knight. In an arrangement resembling nothing so much as an elaborate Inigo Jones set, the enchantment of the Inaccessible Rock begins with a structure shooting flames descending from the sky to support an edifice in which Dalinea’s tomb is placed unreachably high. These special effects create Wroth’s Second Part as a bold experiment reflecting on those preposterous elements it shares with masques.
A strong criticism of lyric is also levelled in the Second Part. In a friendly social setting, Pamphilia sings a poem by Amphilanthus, attributed to Pembroke, ‘Had I loved butt at that rate’. The poem is a masterpiece of psychological manipulation. The male narrator of the poem assumes the blame for his beloved’s neglect for, as a woman, she was unable to reciprocate his depth of love. He can blame only himself for her emotional inadequacy: ‘Non showld bee prest/Beeyound ther best’ (Second Part 31). It is a lie on several levels. The introduction to the poem discloses that he had written it ‘when hee made a shew of love to Antissia, and had given itt her, though ment to a higher beauty’ (30). His claim to love her, presumably understood by Antissia to be sincere, heartlessly led her on, for she did love him. As addressed to a ‘higher beauty’, presumably Pamphilia, it becomes perhaps even more disturbing. Pamphilia is passionately constant; and it is the ‘I’ of Amphilanthus that seems unable to return deep love. What does the poem mean when the ‘I’ is inhabited by Pamphilia? Aspersions against women’s inveterate inability to love become deeply ironic. None of this unsettling subtext rises to the surface of this social gathering. Amphilanthus praises her voice and Pamphilia praises his poem. But the falsity and corruption possible to Pembroke’s lyric and to the ‘I’ of his lyric persona has been fully exposed as a ‘hell of deceit’.
In addition to masques and lyrics, the Second Part also implicates other prose romances. Several scholars have painstakingly traced resonances of several romances in the Urania.34 Of particular importance is Melissea, the author figure of both Parts, who determines the narrative by foreseeing the future. In the Second Part, Melissea loses her apparent control. Wroth’s Melissea draws from other female magicians of romance, and especially from the Lady Felicia of George of Montemayor’s Diana and of its continuation, Gaspar Gil Polo’s The Enamoured Diana, both translated into English by Bartholomew Yong in 1598, as well as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, translated by John Harington in 1591.35 Her evocation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso appears in the name Melissea, a close variant of the name Melissa, Ariosto’s female magician; her reference to Ariosto’s romance is further supported by her use of his more unusual name Rodomont for her Rodomandro, King of Tartaria. Wroth’s frequent choice of the adjective ‘sage’ for her Melissea evokes Montemayor’s Felicia, also consistently described as ‘sage’, and at one point in her manuscript continuation, Wroth even writes ‘the sage Felicia’ and then crosses out ‘Felicia’ to write ‘Melissea’.36 Like Wroth’s Melissea, Ariosto’s Melissa and Montemayor’s Felicia are both endowed with foresight into the future and they both use this foresight to further the love relationships of the major protagonists of their respective romances. Their foresight provides a structuring narrative principle; their predictions inevitably come true. But those of Wroth’s Melissea increasingly do not. She uses her Melissea figure to expose the limitations of the genre of prose romance as she draws her own to a close.
There are a number of qualities of Ariosto’s brilliant Orlando Furioso that appear in Wroth’s romance, although it is impossible to claim Ariosto as the only source: the sheer number of interlaced tales often interrupting each other; the solicitous and chatty narrator who asks his readers, for example, to forgive Rogero for his inconstancy (as Wroth’s narrator requests her readers to forgive Amphilanthus); and the debate over women’s constancy, concluding that neither men nor women are capable of it (a central topic although with a different conclusion in the Urania). A primary structuring relationship bridging the work is the relationship between Bradamant and Rogero, who are married in the final canto. Melissa’s primary function in this romance is to ensure this union in order, the logic of the text pretends, that they may successfully produce the glorious descendants of the d’Este family. Melissa’s lengthy list of progeny ends with contemporary personages, most pointedly Ariosto’s current patron Hippolito or Cardinal Ippolito d’Este. Melissa intervenes at crucial moments in this romance to promote the welfare of the lovers. Her ring saves Rogero from the magic of the seductive Alcina. She impersonates the Saracen warrior Rodomont in order to break up a dangerous single combat between Rogero and Renaldo. Melissa saves Rogero from dying for grief when Bradamant is betrothed to Leon, who then waives his claim. At the close of the romance, Melissa provides the cloth for their nuptial tent, which foretells the glory of Hippolito (Cardinal Ippolito d’Este). While as one of several magicians, female as well as male, Ariosto’s Melissa appears only intermittently, she draws to a successful conclusion a plot that wittily gestures to Ariosto’s own hopeful expectations: that the author of a long romance praising the d’Estes, and especially Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, should receive a substantial reward for his artistic efforts. In this hope, he was disappointed.
The closest parallels between Wroth’s Urania and Montemayor’s Diana, with its sequel, Gil Polo’s Diana Enamorata, lie in the many speeches and poems uttered by suffering lovers which, according to the perspectives of these romances, display a nobility—even an innate aristocracy—of soul through the purity of their constant love, freed from the jealousy plaguing baser minds and even from a need for reciprocal devotion. As Montemayor’s romance opens, a shepherd mourns the marriage of his beloved shepherdess Diana to the pathologically jealous Delius. Many speeches and songs ensue in chains of unmatched lovers, each loving one who does not reciprocate. The sage Felicia brings the primary narratives, except for Diana’s, to a successful conclusion. In Gil Polo’s sequel, the unhappily married Diana, now desperately in love with the shepherd, journeys with other lovers to the temple of the goddess Diana, where ‘sage Lady Felicia makes her abode, whose secret wisedome will minister remedies to our painful passions’ (277). Gil Polo’s sympathetic development of Diana’s unrequited passion for the shepherd who no longer loves her shares with Wroth’s romance an interest in the psychological pain of a woman’s passion for an unresponsive beloved. Diana’s cruel torments, like Pamphilia’s, are very productive of verse. Diana’s narrative is neatly resolved when her husband Delius dies conveniently of a fit of jealousy. Felicia softens the heart of Diana’s shepherd and their marriage takes place immediately. In both the Diana and Diana Enamorata, Felicia represents a stable narrative centre. Her unfailingly successful remedies supply happy conclusions for the major characters. Yet, it is all a little too neat; as acknowledged in Gil Polo’s warning to readers not to base their own lives on these unrealistic fictions of fortunate lovers, ‘for one that hath good happe, a thousand there are, whose long and painefull lives with desperate death have been rewarded’ (380).
The romances by both Ariosto and Gil Polo run up against the anti-romance of experience: Ariosto cannot praise a different patron; the Cardinal Ippolito is his employer, whatever his low level of generosity. Gil Polo’s warning shows his awareness of the discrepancy between his fictions and the probable lived experience of his readers. While in the First Part Wroth’s Melissea provides successful remedies for love through a Sapphian leap into the sea, in the Second Part, her wise-woman is at a loss to reconcile romance and experience. She can only warn Amphilanthus of the treachery of a servant; she is powerless to prevent Forsandurus’s betrayal. Unable to obstruct Selarinus’s destructive relationship with a fay, Melissea can only provide food and water to save his life after the fay casts him out in a desert. It is surely no accident that topical interpretations rise to the surface of both of these episodes, although without the certainty of biographical fact. As discussed above, the name Forsandurus implicates Hugh Sanford in the prevention of a possible marriage between Pembroke and Wroth (then Mary Sidney), although biographical fact would show that this marriage was never truly feasible. Near the beginning of the Second Part, the death of Pamphilia’s younger sister Philistella in childbirth clearly calls up the death of Wroth’s younger sister Philip in childbirth in 1620. Who then was the dangerous fay? Was she the eighteen-year-old that Philip’s widowed husband married five months later, or some other disapproved sexual relationship?37 However Wroth’s romance might manipulate interpretation, the basic events of their lives limit what can happen in her romance: Amphilanthus cannot marry Pamphilia because Pembroke does not marry Mary Sidney (Wroth). Like Philip, Philistella dies and her widowed husband, like Philip’s, subsequently engages in a sexual relationship. The powers of Melissea as a wise-woman are constrained by events outside the text that are not subject to change.
The same is true of Wroth as an author. Just as a writer of historical fiction can add characters to manipulate opinion but not change the outcome of an actual battle, so the writer of the Urania cannot change the outcome of the lives evoked in the topicality of her romance. Her control over these events, and so of her own narrative, is limited. Perhaps this is why Melissea’s actions in the Second Part become increasingly intrusive and perhaps even desperate. When children of several protagonists are lost to an enchantment, she is able to transport some of them to Lesbos, but others remain captured by giants. This enchantment is, in the words of Clare Kinney, ‘frankly incoherent’.38 Does this relaxation of authorial control suggest that Wroth is writing only for herself, or does it reflect the incoherence of a world gone awry? Melissea announces at least one future event that will not happen in the space of her manuscript. The enchantment of the Inaccessible Rock will only be resolved by a young knight called Fair Design. The exiled King of Denmark also states that only Fair Design can restore him to his kingdom (331). But these tasks must remain unfinished. According to the young Andromarko, Melissea has foretold that further adventures require the reunion of Fair Design and Amphilanthus:
And Sir, your Faire Designe hath now left all things (beeing certainly informed by severall wisards, especially the sage Melissea), that the great Inchantment will nott bee concluded thes many yeeres; nay, nev[er], if you live nott to assiste in the concluding. For his search is for you, resolving nott to leave you if once found. Till that hapy hower come, and in this Island he is seeking adventur; the best and hapiest, I assure my self, wilbee in finding you.
This is the penultimate sentence of the Second Part. The manuscript ends in a sentence fragment: ‘Amphilanthus wa[s] extreamly’ (418). If, as several critics have claimed, cues in the text gesture to Fair Design as shadowing Pembroke’s son by Mary Wroth, then the continuation of this romance is prevented by the intrusion of lived experience.39 Pembroke’s evident estrangement from his natural son precludes the reunion of Amphilanthus and Fair Design in this topical narrative. This ‘best and happiest’ adventure will never happen and the Fair Design that is simultaneously Wroth’s new protagonist, her son, and her highly designed romance, cannot proceed in the anticipated narrative of joyful meeting. In this refusal of the narrative to conclude, the hard facts of lived experience expose and critique the element of wish fulfilment common to the genres of prose romance, masque, and lyric.
Cavanagh, Sheila. Cherished Torment (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2007).
——— ‘Endless Love: Narrative Technique in the Urania’, Sidney Journal, 26.2 (2008): 83–100.
Hackett, Helen. Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Hannay, Margaret. Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010).
Kinney, Clare R. ed. Ashgate Critical Studies on Women Writers in England, 1550–1700. Vol. 4: Mary Wroth (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009).
——— ‘“Beleeve this butt a fiction”: Female Authorship, Narrative Undoing, and the Limits of Romance in The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania’, Spenser Studies, 17 (2003): 239–50.
Lamb, Mary Ellen. ‘The Biopolitics of Romance in Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania’, English Literary Renaissance, 31.1 (2001): 107–30.
Miller, Jacqueline. ‘Lady Mary Wroth in the House of Busirane’, in Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman, eds., Worldmaking Spenser (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 115–24.
Miller, Shannon. ‘Constructing the Female Self: Architectural Structures in Mary Wroth’s Urania’, in Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, eds., Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 139–61.
Roberts, Josephine A. ‘Critical Introduction’, in Mary Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995).
——— ‘“The Knott Never To Be Untied”: The Controversy Regarding Marriage in Mary Wroth’s Urania’, in Naomi Miller and Gary Waller, eds., Reading Mary Wroth (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 109–32.
Salzman, Paul. ‘Mary Wroth: From Obscurity to Canonization’, in Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 60–89.
Zurcher, Amelia A. ‘Ethics and the Politic Agent of Early Seventeenth-Century Prose Romance’, English Literary Renaissance, 35 (2005): 73–101.