‘For Worth, Not Weakness, Makes in Use but One’: Literary Dialogues in an English Renaissance Family

Abstract

In A Room of One’s Own (1929) Virginia Woolf created a Renaissance woman dramatist called Judith Shakespeare, but lamented that no real counterpart existed for Judith since

it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare’s day should have had Shakespeare’s genius. For genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people … how, then, could it have been born among women whose work began … almost before they were out of the nursery.¹

Woolf was fully accurate in identifying a female author’s need for security, both economic and environmental, but the seeming lack of texts led her to assume that women of the early modern period had experienced neither, instead being trapped within a domestic vortex of familial responsibilities. However, while not questioning Woolf’s primary identification of a writer’s essential requirements, it has become increasingly clear that early modern women were able to access a literary voice, even a ‘dramatic’ one. It is the purpose of this essay to explore the ways in which such cultural productivity could be achieved from within a familial environment, one which both liberated and constrained its female members. I will focus specifically upon the writings of Mary Wroth, one of the first English woman dramatists, and the way in which her voice is both freed by its familial Sidneian identity, and muted by her gender in comparison with the free vocalisations of her uncle, Philip Sidney, her father, Robert Sidney, and her cousin/lover, William Herbert.