Mary Wroth (1587-1651) was daughter to Robert Sidney, the owner of Penshurst where she was raised and educated. As niece to Sir Philip Sidney and his sister, Mary (Sidney) Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, Wroth came from a famous aristocratic and literary family. At age seventeen (in 1604) she married Sir Robert Wroth, hunting companion to King James I and a prominent member of the Jacobean court. It was an unhappy marriage. Robert was a notorious gambler, alcoholic, and adulterer, and the couple from the outset were troubled by a dispute over Robert Sidney’s payment of Mary’s dowry.
Robert Wroth’s death in 1614, a month after the birth of their son, was followed two years later by the death of the boy (a not uncommon occurrence in Wroth’s day—though surely no less painful for her than for bereft mothers of later periods when the child mortality rate was much lower). If this were not enough, the death of her son, heir to the Wroth estate, meant her losing the property to the next male heir, John Wroth. Such is the feudal law of primogeniture, according to which property in England is passed along the male line of descent.
Shortly following the death of her husband, Mary Wroth entered into a lifelong adulterous affair with her first cousin, the 3rd earl of Pembroke, William Herbert. The two appear to have shared an interest in literature and had been friends since childhood. They also had two illegitimate children, a son and daughter.
It is not surprising, then, that Wroth was drawn to the love sonnet as a literary form suited to her sensibility. Being in love with a man she could never fully have, their affair secretive (though surely known publicly, if not openly acknowledged): such real-life circumstances are analogous to the fictional construct of the European romance tradition in which passionate desire is for some reason frustrated or blocked altogether.
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus
(meaning “lover of all” to “lover of two”) had circulated widely in manuscript
form before being printed and published in 1621. This is a landmark publication
in the history of English letters, being the first sonnet sequence by a woman,
and appearing in the same era that saw publication of works by important male
authors—including Ben Jonson’s Works (1616),
the first folio of Shakespeare (1623), Donne’s Poems (1633), and George Herbert’s Temple
(1633).
As niece to Philip Sydney, famous for his own sonnet sequence,
Astrophil and Stella (“star lover and star”),
Mary Wroth consciously waded into a male-dominated literary tradition, and did
so at a time when sonnet writing had become largely unfashionable. But like
Donne manipulating love-sonnet conventions in “Holy Sonnet XIV,” Wroth brings to
that tradition a fresh perspective and formal ingenuity. She does so by engaging
in a kind of subversion, mastering the discourse of her literary forbears, then
reversing roles so that the lover is female, the beloved male. The beloved,
moreover, seems to play a relatively minor role: Wroth concentrates instead on
the speaker’s psyche and experience, and less on her relationship with the
beloved than on her relationship with Love—i.e., Venus and Eros (or
Cupid), the mother of Love and her son.
Many of Wroth’s sonnets, finally, are formally innovative, combining in their rhyme patterns the Italian and Shakespearean forms, and in some cases abandoning both these traditions for something altogether new.
Choose one of the poems below and do the following: Paraphrase each sentence. Identify two or three puzzling words and
research their meaning in the Oxford English
Dictionary. Revise your paraphrase, if necessary. Comment on one or two striking images,
explaining why you think them effective. Identify any particularly striking sound effects
(rhyme, alliteration or assonance, enjambment, caesurae) and explain
how they enhance the meaning. Compare your poem with one by some other author
whose work we’ve examined, and support your comparison by citing
specific passages. Include any additional comments you care to
offer.