Abstract
As Wroth scholars have increasingly recognized,1 the overarching narrative of her prose romance, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, in both its published first part of 1621 and the equally substantial unpublished second part, is driven by the desire of the dynasty at its core to establish a “universal Christian empire” covering Eurasia.2 This end is accomplished through the premodern mode of European expansionism: marital alliances combined with military interventions. The marriage of the Tartar king Rodomandro and the Greek princess Pamphilia, who becomes queen of her eponymous realm in Asia Minor, unites “East” and “West” under Western Christian hegemony without demanding the exclusion of racialized “others,” as would subsequent anglocentric models of empire. The Tartar king’s leadership is crucial to the military campaigns in Central Asia and Persia that propel the narrative. They are meant to secure both regions, only implicitly Islamized in the romance, for Western Christian and Christian(ized) Eastern rulers. This imaginary resolution of the real conditions of imperialist expansion within Eurasia during the early decades of the seventeenth century, with the Safavid Persians dominating Central Asia and the Ottomans a significant force in central Europe and the Mediterranean, draws attention to discourses of difference related to English colonial efforts in the Americas that targeted Native Americans and Africans.3
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Notes
Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1995
Josephine A. Roberts initiated this line of investigation in her Critical Introduction to Mary Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Roberts (Binghamton, New York: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1995). Wroth published this romance, the first of its kind by an Englishwoman, in 1621. For the manuscript continuation, see Mary Wroth, The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts, completed by Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller (Tempe, Arizona: Renaissance English Text Society, 1999). Extended analyses of themes related to empire in this second part, which introduces Tartar and Persian characters, include Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1995), 187–210; Shelia T. Cavanagh, Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 19–52; Bernadette Andrea, Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 30–52; and Victor Skretkowicz, European Erotic R.omance: Philhellene Protestantism, Renaissance Translation, and English Literary Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 271–335.
On “universal Christian empire,” see John M. Headley, “The Habsburg World Empire and the Revival of Ghibellinism,” in Theories of Empire, 1450–1800, ed. David Armitage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 50. Armitage, in his Introduction to Theories of Empire, xv-xxxiii, puts this imperial discourse, which Headley analyzes in terms of the Spanish king and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1550–8), in a broader temporal and geographic frame. Frances A. Yates, “The Tudor Imperial Reform,” in Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 29–121, relates it to English aspirations. Skretkowicz cites Yates at the beginning of his chapter on “Mary Sidney Wroth’s Urania” in European-Erotic Romance, 271–2. However, his reading of the romance as an “allegorised political fantasy [that] conjures up a vision of a Protestant Europe coming piecemeal, over three generations, under the control of the Sidney-Herbert families” is overly literalist (273).
I fully understand that “Native American” is an anachronistic term; I use it in this essay to signal the various early modern terms for the indigenous people of this continent. I similarly use the term “African” to denote the various ethnic groups the English encountered on that continent.
Sujata Iyengar, Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005
Sujata Iyengar, Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 20. Iyengar discusses Heliodorus’s Aithiopika or Ethiopian Story (230–75 CE), which was hugely influential in the Renaissance. For more, see Skretkowicz, European Erotic Romance, 111–65, and Elizabeth Bearden’s forthcoming study, Emblematics of the Self: Ekphrasis and Identity in Renaissance Imitations of Ancient Greek Romance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).
Wroth, The Second Part of the… Urania, 42, 9. Henceforth cited parenthetically as U2. On “strategies of exclusion and inclusion” in the Jacobean masque, see Martin Butler, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 114.
Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), xii.
Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 8.
On the inextricability of race and religion in English discourses of the period, see Margaret W. Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 316–29.
As Gustav Ungerer documents in The Mediterranean Apprenticeship of British Slavery (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2008), English involvement in the trans-Atlantic trade began far earlier than scholars sometimes maintain. He discusses English slave traders such as William de la Founte from the late fifteenth century, Thomas Malliard and Nicolas Arnold from the beginning of the sixteenth century, and Robert Thorne in the 1530s.
Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984
Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999
Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 11, 13. For related views, see Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 10, and Daniel Goffman, Britons in the Ottoman Empire, 1642–1660 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 4.
C. W. Connell, “Western Views of the Tartars, 1240–1340” (PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, 1969), 24–8, discusses the shifting designations of “East” and “West” from the medieval through the early modern period, which corresponds to the shift from a Jerusalem-centered worldview to a eurocentric one. I use the term “the West” with his qualifications in mind. See also C. W. Connell, “Western Views of the Origin of the ‘Tartars’: An Example of the Influence of Myth in the Second Half of the Thirteenth Century,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 3.1 (1973): 115–37.
For a study that extends Hall’s focus on “a semiotics of race in early modern English culture generally” (Things of Darkness 10), see Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds. Women, “Race” and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London: Routledge, 1994). For a more recent assessment, see Loomba and Burton, eds., Race in Early Modern England. These important studies on “race” in early modern England bookend an immense amount of work in this field; Loomba and Burton list representative examples in their endnotes to their Introduction (28–36).
For early modern maps representing Central Asia as Tartaria, see Elio Christoph Brancaforte, Visions of Persia: Mapping the Travels of Adam Olearius (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003), 164–5. On the maps Wroth likely consulted, including Mercator’s and Ortelius’s, see Hannay, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth, 244. Roberts, Critical Introduction to The First Part of the… Urania, links Rodomandro to “the Saracen Rodomonte” from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (xxvii). The complete version of this influential romance was published in Italian in 1532 and translated into English by John Harington in 1591.
For the past and present history of the Nestorians, see William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 66, 136, 139–42.
Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003
On “proto-orientalism,” see Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 17. For “the Renaissance/early modern/colonial period,” see Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), viii. Mignolo marks this moment as occurring “when Europe moves from a peripheral situation in relation to Islam to a central position in relation to the constitution of the Spanish Empire, the expulsion of the Moors, and the success of trans-Atlantic expansion” from the end of the fifteenth century (xi).
Benedict S. Robinson, Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 14.
Hannay, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth, remarks that Wroth “wrote sonnets in an old-fashioned mode” (xiii; see also 181–2). For more on Wroth’s belated Petrarchism, see Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1995), 134–61.
Ibid., 54; Andrea, “Persia, Tartaria, and Pamphilia,” 34–6. For the identification of Muscovy with the East in the period, see John Michael Archer Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 101–38.
Susan Frye, “Mary Sidney Wroth: Clothing Romance,” in Pens and Needles: Women’s Textualities in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 206.
Ibid., 63. See also Linda McJannet, “Pirates, Merchants, and Kings: Oriental Motifs in English Court and Civic Entertainments, 15101659,” in The Mysterious and the Foreign in Early Modern England, eds. Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 249–65.
On the presence of the Moroccan and Russian ambassadors at the masques, see Butler, Stuart Court Masque, 50, 53, 55. Hannay, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth, indicates that Wroth may have seen both ambassadors at court entertainments (77); she may also have encountered Pocahontas at a masque performance (177–8). For the participation of low-status non-Westerners in court entertainments in sixteenth-century Scottish entertainments, including those involving King James and his queen, see Bernadette Andrea, “Black Skin, The Queen’s Masques: Africanist Ambivalence and Feminine Author(ity) in the Masques of Blackness and Beauty,” English Literary Renaissance 29 (1999): 246–81. For “An English Masque at Constantinople” in the 1650s, see Barbara Ravelhoffer, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 230–61.
Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Early Modern Literary Studies 6.3 (2001): 4.1–17
Mary Wroth, The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), ed. Josephine A. Roberts, 99, lines 1–4. Roberts retains the original spelling, but adjusts capitalization. In the 1621 printed edition of “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” the word “Love” is capitalized. For the relationship of the sonnet sequence and the masque form, see Anita M. Hagerman, “‘But Wroth pretends’: Discovering Jonsonian Masque in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Early Modern Literary Studies 6.3 (2001): 4.1–17. For the view that “Wroth’s crown of sonnets contained within Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is a masque rather than part of a traditional sonnet sequence,” see Susan Lauffer O’Hara, “Sonnets as Theater: The Performance of Ideal Love and the Negation of Marriage in Mary Wroth’s Masque,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 29.1 (2003):
On “reverse ethnography,” see Ros Ballaster, Fables of the East: Selected Tales, 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 260.
See Josephine A. Roberts, “‘The Knott Never to Bee Untied’: The Controversy Regarding Marriage in Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, eds. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 115.
For the debate about whether Othello and Desdemona consummated their marriage, see Michael Neill, “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 396n37.
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© 2011 Bernadette Andrea and Linda McJannet
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Andrea, B. (2011). The Tartar King’s Masque and Performances of Imperial Desire in Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania . In: Andrea, B., McJannet, L. (eds) Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119826_5
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