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by John Butler and Anniina Jokinen
Lady Wroth with archlute.
Unknown artist.
From the collection of Viscount De L'Isle.
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Lady Mary Wroth was the daughter of Robert
Sidney, later Earl of Leicester, and the wealthy heiress Barbara
Gamage, first cousin to Sir Walter Ralegh.
Robert Sidney was himself a poet,
and the younger brother of Sir Philip Sidney
and Mary Herbert,
Countess of Pembroke. Because of her father's appointment as
Governor of Flushing in the Netherlands in 1588, Mary spent much of her
early childhood at the house of Mary Sidney, Countess of Montgomery.
When Elizabeth I
died in 1603, Robert Sidney was recalled to court by James I, who
created him Earl of Leicester and made him one of his chief advisers
and courtiers.
In 1604 Mary was married to Sir Robert
Wroth, a wealthy landowner in favor with James I. Although the marriage
was not a happy one, Wroth's favor with the king brought Lady Mary into
court circles. She even got a role in Queen
Anne's first masque, Ben Jonson's Masque of
Blackness, as Ethiopian nymph Baryte. She also appeared in
Jonson's Masque of Beauty three years later. Lady Mary became a
personal acquaintance of Ben Jonson who dedicated his The
Alchemist to her. It has been speculated that the two were perhaps
lovers at some time, though there is little evidence to support it. Sir
Robert Wroth had been a reputed wastrel, spendthrift, drunkard, and
womanizer—his death in 1614 left Mary in enormous debt.
For some time Mary Wroth had been the
mistress of her first cousin William
Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, with whom she had two illegitimate
children, a son and a daughter. The birth of one was celebrated in a
poem by Lord
Herbert of Chirbury, another relative and literary admirer of
Mary's. The scandal probably affected her standing at court—she was no
longer asked to appear in masques, nor to be part of Queen Anne's
circle of friends.
In 1621, Lady Wroth's prose romance The
Countess of Montgomeries Urania was published. In Urania,
drawing partly on court events, scandals and personalities, Wroth
relates the love story of Pamphilia and Amphilanthus, which she uses as
a framing-story for a large number of tales about female characters
married to unsuitable husbands or matched with unfaithful lovers. Like
Sidney's Arcadia,
which Wroth
clearly admired and perhaps imitated (depending on the definition of
"imitate," although Jonson's sense of the word fits better than
"epigone"), Urania takes love as its main theme and the prose
is interspersed with poems, printed at the end as a sonnet-sequence in
the first edition. Wroth's interest is the idea of fidelity, and the
double standard erected by men around its practice. Pamphilia knows
that Amphilanthus, her lover (they are not married), has the capability
to be faithful, and she also insists, which is novel, that he must
learn to be faithful in order to be worthy of her. Thus, while it looks
like Pamphilia is just playing out another patient-Griselda scenario,
the opposite is the case. As she is not married to him, she does not
have to be loyal, but chooses to be so. She also considers herself
worthy of him only if he lives up to her standards, and although
Amphilanthus does not at first buy her ideas about male responsibility
and maturity, he eventually comes around. The other characters (and
there are quite a few) play out variations of the same theme. What also
makes the work interesting is that the women are consciously searching
for their own identities, which they perceive as being apart from the
men in their lives; the book opens, for example, with Urania in
search of herself—she is aware that she is not really a shepherdess,
but she does not know who she is beyond that.
Urania caused great controversy
because of its purported similarities to actual people and events. In
particular, Edward Denny, Baron of Waltham, charged Wroth with slander.
He wrote two angry letters to her and attacked the work in a poem. This
poem was mocked by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, in the
final couplet of her 1664 preface to Sociable Letters.1 Lady Wroth claimed innocence and wrote a
brilliant poem in answer. In addition, she sent letters of appeal to
friends of James I and bought back many of the books. This did not
deter her from writing a sequel, The Second Part of the Countesse
of Montgomerys Urania, but the work remained unpublished. She also
wrote an unpublished play, Love's
Victory, and some poetry.
Of her later life virtually nothing is
known or recorded, the scholarly consensus being that her reputation
was permanently besmirched by Urania's notoriety and that she
must have kept a low profile.
1 Roberts, Josephine A. "The
Life of Lady Mary Wroth." The
Poems of Lady Mary Wroth
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.
A Short Bibliography:
- Hannay, Margaret Patterson. "Mary
Sidney: Lady Wroth."
Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation.
Katharina M. Wilson, ed. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987.
- MacArthur, Janet. "'A Sydney, Though
Unnamed': Lady Mary Wroth and Her Poetical Progenitors."
English Studies in Canada March 1989: v15(1),
12-20.
- Miller, Naomi J. and Gary F. Waller,
eds. Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern
England.
Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.
- Paulissen, May. "Forgotten Love
Sonnets of the Court of King James: The Sonnets of Mary Wroth."
Publications of the Missouri Philological Association
1978: v3, 24-31.
- Paulissen, May. The Love Sonnets
of Lady Mary Wroth : A Critical Introduction.
Salzburg studies in English literature. Elizabethan & Renaissance
studies ; 104
Salzburg, Austria : Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Universität Salzburg, 1982.
- Quilligan, Maureen. "Lady Mary Wroth:
Female Authority and the Family Romance."
Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance.
George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey, eds.
Ithaca, NY: CUP, 1989.
- Roberts, Josephine A. "Labyrinths of
Desire: Lady Mary Wroth's Reconstruction of Romance."
Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal
1991: v19(2), 183-92.
- Roberts, Josephine A. "The Life of
Lady Mary Wroth." The
Poems of Lady Mary Wroth
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.
- Waller, Gary and Naomi Miller. Reading
Mary Wroth : Representing Alternatives
in Early Modern England. Memphis: University of Tennessee Press,
1991.
- Waller, Gary. The
Sidney Family Romance : Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the
Early Modern Construction of Gender. Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1993.
- Waller, Gary F. "Struggling into Discourse: The
Emergence of Renaissance Women's Writing."
Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons,
Translators, and Writers of Religious Works.
Margaret Patterson Hannay, ed. Kent, OH: KSUP, 1985.
- Wroth, Lady Mary. The
Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library
of Essential Works : Printed Writings, 1500-1640. London: Scolar
Press, 1996.
- Wroth, Lady Mary. The
First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania.
Josephine A. Roberts, ed. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Text
Society, 1995.
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Biography ©1998-2006. Anniina Jokinen
and
John Butler. All Rights Reserved.
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