Mary Sidney Wroth: Pamphilia, Poetry, and Prose

Mary Sidney, lady Wroth (born 18 October 1587)

The namesake of another Mary Sidney (about whom I'll be posting later this month), today's Mary Sidney is the daughter of Robert Sidney (whose mother, Mary Dudley Sidney, was the sister of Guildford Dudley, who married Jane Grey, and of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth's favorite, "Robin"--got all that?). Mary was the daughter of Sidney and first wife, Barbara Gammage, a wealthy heiress (and cousin of Sir Walter Raleigh).

A 1607 portrait thought to be of
Mary Sidney Wroth

Robert Sidney was both a patron of poets and a poet himself. At Penshurst, he welcomed writers and musicians. Ben Jonson would memorialize the artistic coterie promoted by Sidney in his poem "To Penshurst" (long regarded as the first country-house poem, though Aemilia Lanyer's "To Cooke-ham" probably preceded it). 

In the late 1960s, Robert Sidney's own compositions came to light when a manuscript of his poetry was discovered. Dating to the 1590s, the collection includes a variety of lyric forms, most notably that most popular of Renaissance English forms, the sonnet. (If you're interested, you can read about Robert Sidney, the discovery of his manuscript, and the poems themselves by clicking here.)

Mary Sidney's uncle, Sir Philip Sidney, has long been recognized as one of the great poets of early-modern England, but for her aunt and namesake, the third Sidney sibling, that took a bit longer. The elder Mary Sidney is now also recognized as a superlative patron, editor and publisher (of her brother Sir Philip's work) and, more importantly, writer. (As I noted above, I'll be posting on Mary Sidney Herbert later this month.)

Given these literary antecedents and models, that the younger Mary Sidney should choose to become a writer makes perfect sense--though it has taken centuries for her to gain (or, rather, to regain) recognition as a writer. 

In 1604 the younger Mary Sidney was married--unhappily--to Sir Robert Wroth, which has given her the name--Lady Mary Wroth--by which she is now most widely known, if for no other reason, I suspect, than to reduce confusion with her aunt, Mary Sidney (and even her grandmother, Mary [Dudley] Sidney). 

The accomplished Lady Mary
Sidney Wroth, with a lute

As Lady Mary Wroth, she was a member of the court of James I and his wife, Anne of Denmark--the queen was herself a great patron of the arts who was particularly interested in the staging of court masques.

I first encountered Lady Mary Wroth, in fact, not as a writer but as a performer, noted for her participation in the 1605 production of Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness and its 1608 sequel, The Masque of Beauty. (Jonson would dedicate The Alchemist to Wroth.)

But Mary Sidney Wroth was more than a performer of work written and produced by others or the recipient of literary compliments, however graceful and flattering.

A reference to her as early as 1613 comments on her poetry and says that "her uncle's noble vein renews" in her. Ben Jonson also refers to Wroth copying out ("inscribing") her poems for private distribution among readers, a typical form of "publication" for early-modern writers.

Wroth's The Countess of Montgomery's Urania (1621) was the first prose romance published by an English woman writer. This pastoral narrative was modeled on Sir Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, a pastoral romance composed at Penshurst and, he says, written to entertain his sister, Mary Sidney, countess of Pembroke. Wroth's Urania was dedicated to her dear friend--and literary patron--Susan de Vere, countess of Montgomery (the daughter of the Elizabethan poet and courtier Edward de Vere).

Attached to the Urania was Wroth's sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, modeled on Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella. In its published version, Wroth's sequence included eighty-three sonnets and twenty songs. Among all the sonnet sequences published in England during the Renaissance, Wroth's is unique, written from the perspective of a female lover, Pamphilia, to a male beloved, Amphilanthus.* But this published version of the sequence is a revision of an earlier version of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus--a manuscript version, copied in Wroth's own hand, contains 110 sonnets and songs.

Wroth's sonnet sequence not only follows and subverts the model of sequences like Astrophil and Stella, but within the sequence is the "crown"--a series of fourteen linked sonnets. The series begins with Wroth's most well-known poem, "In this strange labyrinth, how shall I turn?" The fourteenth (and last) line of each sonnet in this "crown" becomes the first line of the next until the last sonnet in the series: its final line, "In this strange labyrinth, how shall I turn?" takes us back to the beginning, thus bringing the crown full circle.

(The corona, like the sonnet itself, is an Italian poetic form. Sir Philip Sidney had included a corona in Arcadia, linking ten ten-line lyrics and describing this form as "that kind of verse which is called the Crown." Wroth's father, Robert Sidney, also experimented with a crown, notably a crown of sonnets, but he completes only four sonnets and the beginning of a fifth, noting the failure of his effort with "the rest . . . doth want.")

In addition to her prose narrative and her sonnet sequence, with its embedded "Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love," Wroth also composed an original pastoral drama, probably about 1620, Love's Victory. In this she may also have followed Sir Philip Sidney's model--his one-act masque, The Lady of May, was written and performed for Queen Elizabeth in 1578 or 1579, its text preserved in a manuscript copy of Arcadia.

Wroth's life was not without its personal difficulties and complications--not least of which was the scandal that resulted from her daring to publish Urania. I'll leave that to you, if you're interested--you will find an excellent biographical essay here, and it includes a discussion of the "storm of criticism" that followed the publication of Urania.

You will find a complete online edition of her Pamphilia to Amphilanthus here. For Urania, I recommend the edition (abridged) by Mary Ellen Lamb, Mary Wroth: The Countess of Montgomery's Urania. The text of Wroth's pastoral play Love's Victory is in S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne Davies's Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents.

And for an excellent analysis of "why women in the English Renaissance wrote so few sonnet sequences in comparison with Continental women writers and English male writers," I recommend Rosalind Smith's Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560-1621: The Politics of Absence.

And, by the way--while it was originally thought that Wroth's is the first sonnet sequence written by an English woman, it now seems that is not the case. Anne Vaughan Locke (1530-c. 1590) was the first woman to compose a sonnet sequence-- Locke’s A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner was published in 1560, a sequence of 26 sonnets based on Psalm 51. (Actually she was not only the first Englishwoman to write a sonnet sequence, but the first English writer to do so.) Wroth's is certainly the first Petrarchan sequence, with its focus on secular love--though Mary, queen of Scots also wrote sonnets based on Petrarchan models. You can sample by clicking here.

*There were sonnet sequences written from the perspective of female lovers on the Continent--Gaspara Stampa and Louise Labé both wrote Petrarchan sonnets from the point-of-view of a female speaker, as we've seen in earlier posts.

Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow, Queen, Regent, and Money-Maker

Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow (born 4 September 1557)

Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow was the daughter of Ulrich III and his wife, Princess Elizabeth of Denmark. On 20 July 1572, when she was fourteen, she was married to the Danish king, Frederick II, at the urging of his council. (For his part, Frederick would rather have married his long-time mistress, but he was barred from doing so by that same council). 

Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow
at the time of her marriage,
1672
 

Whatever the reasons for their marriage, and despite what Frederick's preferences may have been, the couple produced eight children. During her husband's lifetime, Sophie seems to have played no role in government.

She did, however, interest herself in science, particularly astronomy, and is known to have visited the famed Tycho Brahe at his observatory on the island of Hven. (Tycho Brahe and his sister and assistant, Sophia Brahe, herself a fascinating and accomplished woman, were children of Beate Brille Brahe, Queen Sophie's chief lady in waiting from 1584-92.)

When the time came, like so many aristocratic women before her, Queen Sophie devoted herself to arranging politically advantageous marriages for her children.* 

After the death of Frederick II on 4 April 1588, Sophie's son Christian IV, then eleven, became king of Denmark and Norway, but his mother was denied a place on his regency council. However, in 1590, she was appointed as regent of the duchies of Schleswig-Holstein for her son, a role she played until 1594. She was also the reigning dowager of her own estates of Lolland-Falster from 1588 until her death.

She devoted herself to studies, particularly in chemistry and astronomy, to trade, to money-lending, and to renovation of the palace of Nykøbing Slot--although Sophie had been exiled there after she found herself in conflict with the council of state, she doesn't seem to have let that bother her too much. She was so successful in her ventures that she was able to lend her son money to fund his various military campaigns. (And there were lots of them--he went to war against Sweden in 1611 in the Kalmar War and joined in the Thirty Years' War in 1625.)

Sophie also intervened when two Danish noblewomen found themselves in trouble. In 1599, Rigborg Brockenhuus, a maid of honor to her son Christian's wife, Anne-Catherine of Brandenburg, got herself into trouble for having an illegitimate child. Rigborg was sentenced to life imprisonment in her father's castle, but in 1608 Sophie intervened to have the disgraced woman allowed out once a week so that she could attend church. 

In 1626, when her grandson's mistress, Anne Henriskdattar Lykke, was arrested on the order of Christian IV (who thought she was a bad influence on his son), Sophie again intervened. Anne Lykke was a noblewoman, and Christian IV's treatment of her had brought him into conflict with his council. The king then accused her of having hired a witch to cause him harm. Anne Lykke was eventually released, though she was under house arrest on her estate. 

Sophie as Queen Dowager

When Dowager Queen Sophie died  14 October 1631, she was recognized as the wealthiest woman in northern Europe.

I have not been able to find a biography of Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow, but there is a fair amount about her in Leeds Barroll's biography of her daughter, Anne of Denmark, who eventually became queen of England. 

*When Sophie arranged the marriage of her daughter, Anna, to the king of Scotland, the match brought her into conflict with the regency council. Nevertheless, Anne of Denmark was married to King James VI of Scotland, on 23 November 1589. After Elizabeth Tudor's death in 1603, James VI of Scotland became king of England as James I, and Sophie's daughter Anne became queen of England. 

Poet Aemilia Lanyer, Shakespeare's Contemporary

Aemilia Bassano Lanyer (buried 3 April 1645)

Although details of her life are few, Aemilia Bassano was baptized in the London church of St. Botolph on 27 January 1569, the daughter of Baptiste Bassano, a court musician. Long lost to history, Aemilia Lanyer rocketed to prominence in 1973, when historian A. L. Rowse published Shakespeare the Man, in which he argued that Lanyer was the "dark lady" of Shakespeare's sonnets.

Rowse's identification of Lanyer as Shakespeare's "dark lady" is now generally discounted by Lanyer scholars--in any case, however exciting the idea of her connection to Shakespeare's sonnets may have been, it reduced Lanyer to being an object of a famous poet's desire. But Rowse's identification did bring Lanyer back to scholarly attention. Now she is recognized not as the "dark lady" of someone's fevered imagination but as an accomplished poet in her own right, one who is a notable poetic contemporary of Shakespeare.

Lanyer published her anthology Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Hail, God, King of the Jews) in 1611. It is a composite volume--the book begins with a series of  lyrics addressed to royal and aristocratic women, including Anne of Denmark, queen of England, and her daughter, Elizabeth Stuart (click and scroll down), the poet Mary Sydney, and Anne Clifford, the countess of Dorset. These lyrics are composed in an impressive range of styles: six-line stanzas, rime-royal stanzas, cross-rhymed quatrains, and ottava rima. Three of the prefatory dedications are in prose: one to "all virtuous ladies in general," one to Margaret, countess of Cumberland, and one to "the virtuous reader." 

The body of the work, the title poem Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, is a narrative of 1840 lines, 230 rime-royal stanzas, that tells the story of Christ's passion. It represents a kind of counternarrative to the New Testament accounts of Jesus's arrest, trial, and crucifixion, telling the story from the perspective of women. The most arresting part of Lanyer's retelling is the section she entitles "Eve's Apology"--here, Lanyer expands one New Testament reference to Pilate's wife, which ascribes to her a few words (from Mark 27:19: when Pilate sits down "on the judgment seat," his wife sends for him, "saying, 'Have you nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him.'").

In Lanyer's Salve Deus, Pilate's wife offers an extended speech in defense of Eve, culminating in a direct address not only to Pilate but to all men. If Eve sinned in having "tasted of the Tree," condemning women to pain and subservience, then Pilate's sin, in condemning Jesus to death, is a sin that "surmounts" Eve's and should reverse the situation. In the words of Pilate's wife: 

Then let us have our liberty again
And challenge to [claim for] yourselves no sovereignty;
You came not in the world without our pain,
Make that a bar against your cruelty;
Your fault being greater, why should you disdain
Our being your equals, free from tyranny?
If one weak woman simply did offend,
This sin of yours hath no excuse nor end.

Rounding out the volume is "The Description of Cooke-ham," a country-house poem, and one final prose prose piece, "To the doubtful reader."

There is, of course, a lot of craziness out there about Aemilia Lanyer--but why not start with her work? You can access the full-text of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum here, but I recommend Susanne Woods's edition, The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, which offers excellent introductory material and notes.

And then, just for fun, you might enjoy John Hudson's The Dark Lady: The Woman Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays. Hudson argues not that Lanyer was the the object of Shakespeare's desires, real or fictional, but that she is the real author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare! Ha! Talk about reversal of fortune!

Lanyer died in 1645, at the age of seventy-six, and was buried on 3 April at St. James, Clerkenwell. (The old church no longer exists--it was rebuilt in the eighteenth century.)

(There are no known portraits of Aemilia Lanyer, though various lovely images, including an especially beautiful miniature by Nicholas Hilliard, have been said to represent Lanyer.)