Abstract
Whenever Elizabeth needed to assert her authority, she cited her love for her subjects and their love for her. By giving the traditional male rhetoric of love a female voice and insisting that she would only marry someone who satisfied her “liking”, Elizabeth constituted an affective discourse of reciprocal love that other early modern women could adapt to their own purposes. By representing Venus, queen of love, as the guiding force behind her play and her sonnet sequence, Mary Wroth invoked a regal precursor and mentor capable of providing the literary authority she and her female avatars needed to blazon new female roles as poets and lovers.
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- 1.
Edmund Spenser, The faerie queene Disposed into twelue bookes, fashioning XII. Morall vertues (London: Printed [by Richard Field] for William Ponsonbie. 1596), A2v. STC (2nd ed.) / 23082. Early English Books Online, accessed June 8, 2017.
- 2.
Allison Heisch, “Elizabeth I and the Persistence of Patriarchy”, Feminist Review 4 (1980): 45–56, and “Queen Elizabeth I: Parliamentary Rhetoric and the Exercise of Power”, Signs 1 (1975): 31–55; Louis Adrian Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1; Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 1–2; Ilona Bell, Elizabeth I: The Voice of a Monarch (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), published in the “Queenship and Power” series, edited by Carole Levin and Charles Beem, which has so successfully “broaden[ed] our understanding of the strategies that queens—both consorts and regnants, as well as female regents—pursued in order to wield political power within the structures of male-dominant societies”.
- 3.
As John N. King, “Queen Elizabeth: Representations of the Virgin Queen”, Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990), 30–74, demonstrated, the modern view of Elizabeth as Virgin Queen is based on Camden’s distortion of Elizabeth’s first parliamentary speech. For an important corrective, see Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony: the Courtships of Elizabeth I (London, New York: Routledge, 1996).
- 4.
See Judith Richards, “Love and a Female Monarch: The Case of Elizabeth Tudor”, The Journal of British Studies 38 (1999): 133–60.
- 5.
Germaine Warkentin, ed., The Queen Majesty’s Passage and Related Documents (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2004), 75–76.
- 6.
T.E. Hartley, ed., Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1981), 1:34–38.
- 7.
Elizabeth I, Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 57.
- 8.
All definitions taken from The Oxford English Dictionary Online: www.oed.com.
- 9.
John Knox, The first blast of the trumpet against the monstruous regiment of women (Geneva, 1558), 26, 28.
- 10.
Martin A. S. Hume, ed., Calendar of State Papers Simancas (1892; Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1971), 1:70.
- 11.
Elizabeth I, Collected Works, 97.
- 12.
J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 1559–1581 (London: Alden Press 1953), 1:142.
- 13.
Margaret P. Hannay, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010) offers a wonderfully detailed rendition of Wroth’s life.
- 14.
For a path-breaking account of Herbert’s and Wroth’s lyric exchange, see Mary Ellen Lamb, “‘Can you suspect a change in me’: Poems by Mary Wroth and William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke”, Re-Reading Mary Wroth, ed. Katherine Larson and Naomi Miller with Andrew Strycharski (Houndsmills, Burlington, VT: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 53–68.
- 15.
For a fuller account of the differences between the two versions, see Ilona Bell, “The Autograph Manuscript of Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus”, in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, V, Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 2007–2011 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in conjunction with Renaissance English Text Society, 2014); reprinted in Re-Reading Mary Wroth, 171–81.
- 16.
Wroth’s poetry is quoted from “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus” in Manuscript and Print, ed. Ilona Bell, with texts by Steven W. May and Ilona Bell, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe; The Toronto Series, 59 (Toronto: Iter Press, 2017 and Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017). All quotations are from the manuscript text unless indicated otherwise. Digital images of MS V.a.104 are available at the Folger Shakespeare Library website. An electronic text, edited by Paul Salzman, can be found at http://wroth.latrobe.edu.au/index.html. Josephine Roberts’ influential edition, The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), blurs the differences between the two versions by combining the 1621 sequence of poems with the spelling, punctuation, and some but not all the variants from the manuscript.
- 17.
For a fuller account of the differences between the two manuscripts, see Michael G. Brennan’s introduction to his facsimile edition, Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory: The Penshurst Manuscript (London: The Roxburghe Club, 1988), 16–20.
- 18.
Catherine Belsey, “The Myth of Venus in Early Modern Culture”, English Literary Renaissance 42 (2012): 179–202, provides an illuminating survey of Venus’s many metamorphoses. As Christine Kondoleon writes in the introduction to Aphrodite and the Gods of Love, ed. Christine Kondoleon with Phoebe C. Segal (Boston: MFA Publications, 2011), 11, Greek art depicts Venus’s counterpart, “Aphrodite in her multivalent roles as adulterous seductress; instigator of sexual desire; mother of the mischievous Eros and to the sexual outliers Hermaphrodite and Priapos; patroness of brides, seafarers, and warriors; and an agent of political harmony”.
- 19.
Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 59.
- 20.
Theresa Tinkle, Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics, and English Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 107.
- 21.
See Phoebe C. Segal, “The Paradox of Aphrodite: A philandering Goddess of Marriage”, in Aphrodite and the Gods of Love, 63–85. As Segal writes, “Aphrodite’s skilled employment of her unparalleled beauty to seduce her lovers, whether marital or extramarital, provided a model” for brides, wives, concubines, and courtesans (83).
- 22.
Quoted from The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 2:4, First song: 16, 72:6–7.
- 23.
Quoted from Petrarch, Triumphs, trans. Ernest Hatch Wilkins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 5–6.
- 24.
Cf. Paul Salzman, “Not Understanding Mary Wroth’s Poetry”, Parerogon 29 (2012): 133–48; 135, which describes “this kind of syntactic impasse which may not interfere with the gist of the poem but which pulls the reader up” as “strategic obscurity”.
- 25.
See, for example, Elaine V. Beilin, “‘The Only Perfect Vertue’: Constancy in Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus”, Spenser Studies 2 (1981): 229–45.
- 26.
Based on the 1621 sequence, Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 157, speculates: “Probably it is also significant that Venus sometimes represents lustful, irresponsible love, whereas her son symbolizes the more desirable alternative…. Wroth herself was sometimes associated with the very qualities she attributes to Venus. In other words, Wroth may well be at once denying guilt for sexual licentiousness by displacing it onto her mythological creatures and admitting or at least acknowledging guilt by displacing it onto a woman”. The manuscript version calls into question Dubrow’s emphasis on “guilt”.
- 27.
Sandra Yaeger, “‘She who still constant lov’d’: Pamphilia to Amphilanthus as Lady Wroth’s Indictment of Male Codes of Love”, Sidney Newsletter 10 (1990): 89, argues that “like her uncle”, Wroth “demonstrates the harms inherent in a society which devalues the wholesomeness of wedded sexual love”. Yaeger does not consider the possibility that Wroth’s poetry could be about extramarital love.
- 28.
Josephine A. Roberts, “The Biographical Problem of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus”, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 1 (1982): 43–53.
- 29.
Nona Fienberg, “Wroth and the Invention of Female Poetic Subjectivity”, in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 188, argues that “Wroth revises the misogynistic representation of Lady Fortune” because Fortune offers the speaker “warmth, comfort, and resolve”. On the basis of the 1621 version, Fienberg concludes, 189: “The speaker withdraws into an interior realm where the once indifferent or hostile figure of Fortune becomes instead a friend”.
- 30.
Wroth, The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (London, 1621), Cccc1r.
- 31.
See Ilona Bell, “‘Joy’s Sports’: the Unexpurgated Text of Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus”, Modern Philology 110 (2013): 231–52.
- 32.
Paul Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 84; Marion Wynne-Davies, “The Liminal Woman in Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory”, Sidney Journal 26 (2008): 65–81; 81. The reasons for seeing the Huntington manuscript as a performance text are also explained by Josephine A. Roberts, “The Huntington Manuscript of Lady Mary Wroth’s Play, Loves Victorie”, Huntington Library Quarterly 46 (1983): 156–74, and Margaret Hannay, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth, 217–18.
- 33.
For an account of Spenser’s “Amoretti” as poetry of courtship, see Ilona Bell, Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 152–84.
- 34.
Levin, Heart and Stomach, 66–90.
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Bell, I. (2018). Queen of Love: Elizabeth I and Mary Wroth. In: Bertolet, A. (eds) Queens Matter in Early Modern Studies. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64048-8_16
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