Abstract
This chapter explores the nature of complaint in two of Mary Wroth’s works: the pastoral drama, Love’s Victory, and the manuscript continuation of the prose romance, Urania. Both works make extensive use of the complaint through numerous poems and songs written, spoken, and sung by a variety of characters. Wroth’s approach to complaint connects with her interest in hybrid genres, and with her overarching engagement with politics and court culture. While this is at its most complex in the romance, there are connections between the poetic utilisation of complaint in Love’s Victory and its further development in Urania. Resistance to authority is a theme in the play that is further developed in the romance, in both instances through an increasingly complex use of complaint.
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Notes
- 1.
Most recently, see my essay “Me and My Shadow: Editing Wroth for the Digital Age,” in Re-Reading Mary Wroth, ed. Katherine R. Larson, Naomi J. Miller, and Andrew Strycharski (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 183–92. Also, Marta Straznicky, “Lady Mary Wroth’s Patchwork Play: The Huntington Manuscript of Love’s Victory,” Sidney Journal 34, no. 1 (2016): 81–91.
- 2.
The close connection between the two manuscripts is outlined by Margaret P. Hannay in Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 218–19.
- 3.
See the authoritative edition of Huntington by Marta Straznicky, in Women’s Household Drama, ed. Marta Straznicky and Sara Mueller (Toronto: Iter Press, 2018); see also my online edition, “Mary Wroth,” Early Modern Women Research Network Digital Archive, University of Newcastle, https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/emwrn/marywroth
- 4.
Dating of the Urania II manuscript is difficult but I follow Hannay, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth, 263–65.
- 5.
Alexandra G. Bennett, “Playing by and with the Rules: Genre, Politics, and Perception in Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victorie,” in Women and Culture at the Court of the Stuart Queens, ed. Clare McManus (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 124. For a similarly nuanced political interpretation of the play, see Heidi Towers, “Politics and Female Agency in Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victorie,” Women’s Writing 13, no. 3 (2006): 432–47. On pastoral elements see Joyce Green MacDonald, “Ovid and Women’s Pastoral in Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 51, no. 2 (2011): 447–63.
- 6.
Danielle Clarke, “Gender and Paratext in the Complaint Genre,” in Renaissance Paratexts, ed. Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 135.
- 7.
Rosalind Smith, Michelle O’Callaghan, and Sarah C. E. Ross, “Complaint,” in A Companion to Renaissance Poetry, ed. Catherine Bates (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2018), 339–52. See also Smith’s influential essay, “‘I thus goe arm’d to field’: Lindamira’s Complaint,” in Women Writing 1550–1750, ed. Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman (Melbourne: Meridian, 2001), 73–85.
- 8.
Straznicky, “Lady Mary Wroth’s Patchwork Play,” 29.
- 9.
One could also point to the ending of A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, which of course is itself a kind of parody of Romeo and Juliet.
- 10.
It is significant that throughout both the play and Urania, Wroth writes numerous male-voiced complaints. Given the predominance of female-voiced complaints in the period, this is I think part of Wroth’s exploration of shifting gender identities and their expression through poetic exchange.
- 11.
All references to Love’s Victory are to a collation of the two manuscripts: Mary Wroth, Huntington Manuscript, HM 600, Huntington Library, California, and the Penshurst Manuscript consulted in facsimile in Mary Wroth, Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory: The Penshurst Manuscript, ed. Michael G. Brennan (London: Roxburgh Club, 1988). Because page numbers are difficult to normalise, quotations can easily be checked in my online edition of the play at “Mary Wroth.”
- 12.
Alison Findlay, Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 83–94. See also Marion Wynne-Davies, “‘Here is a sport will well befit this time and place’: Allusion and Delusion in Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory,” Women’s Writing 6, no. 1 (1999): 47–64.
- 13.
On clean versus dirty pain, apart from a myriad of popularising online material relating to Acceptance and Commitment therapy, there are some more scientific studies; see for example Russell Harris, “Embracing Your Demons: An Overview of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy,” Psychotherapy.net, accessed June 4, 2019, https://www.psychotherapy.net/article/Acceptance-and-Commitment-Therapy-ACT
- 14.
Hannay, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth, 212–21. Hannay’s invaluable biography outlines the circumstances behind the composition of Love’s Victory; however, I am not convinced by Hannay’s positive view of Wroth’s marriage. For a more politically nuanced yet still biographical interpretation, which associates Wroth with Silvesta, see Beverly M. Van Note, “Performing ‘fitter means’: Marriage and Authorship in Love’s Victory,” in Re-Reading Mary Wroth, ed. Katherine R. Larson, Naomi J. Miller, and Andrew Strycharski (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 69–81.
- 15.
A number of recent approaches to Wroth have emphasised the politicised nature of her writing; see in particular Rosalind Smith, Sonnets and the English Woman Writer 1560–1621: The Politics of Absence (New York: Palgrave, 2005). On Queen Anne, see Courtney Erin Thomas, “Politics and Culture at the Jacobean Court: The Role of Anna of Denmark,” Quidditas 29 (2008): 64–107; Clare McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anne of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court, 1590–1619 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Towers, “Politics and Female Agency,” 432–47.
- 16.
Danielle Clarke, The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing (London: Routledge, 2013), 113–14.
- 17.
Parenthetical references to Mary Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995) as i. and Mary Wroth, The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts, Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller (Tempe: Renaissance English Text Society, 1999) as ii.
- 18.
There is no question any more that Wroth authorised publication of Urania, given her careful set of handwritten corrections and emendations in the Kohler copy of the book, which are footnoted in the Roberts edition, and available in the facsimile edition of that copy in The Early Modern Englishwoman series, Mary Wroth, Mary Wroth: Printed Writings, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (London: Routledge, 1996), and also, as Hannay points out, the accuracy of the frontispiece by Simon Van de Passe, Hannay, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth, 233.
- 19.
Rosalind Smith, “‘Woman-like complaints’: Lost Love in the First Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania,” in Renaissance Loves, special issue of Textual Practice 33 (2019): 1341–62.
- 20.
Julie Crawford, Mediatrix: Women, Politics, & Literary Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 182.
- 21.
Ibid., 203–05. Crawford notes that at the very end of the manuscript the Court of Cyprus excludes women, but that if this alludes to the dissolution of Queen Anne’s Court after her death, Wroth’s response was to “write back” to the masculinisation of political agency. See also Sheila Cavanagh, Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001).
- 22.
It is worth noting that Dalinea in Urania is a completely different character to Dalina/Dalinea in Love’s Victory.
- 23.
Melissa Sanchez, Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), chapter 5, although it is curious and perhaps significant that towards the end of the manuscript Pamphilia is suffering from an especially painful leg injury, which seems, at least momentarily, like an outward sign of her inward torment over her marriage (see ii.390).
- 24.
Hannay, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth, 268.
- 25.
See ii.410 and note. For example, the Archas in Urania is really Amicles, Trebisound’s tutor, and a benign character in contrast to the troublemaker of Love’s Victory; there is also a Rustic, though that character’s name is commonplace for its associations with simple country folk.
- 26.
The efficacy of Love’s Victory in performance has recently been attested to by two productions held at Penshurst. For an account of the 2016 production, see Alison Findlay, “Love’s Victory in Production at Penshurst,” Sidney Journal 34, no. 1 (2016): 107–22, and also Naomi J. Miller, “Playing with Margaret Cavendish and Mary Wroth: Staging Early Modern Women’s Dramatic Romances for Modern Audiences,” Early Modern Women 10 (2016): 95–110. For an account of the 2018 production, see Shakespeare and his Sisters (website), Lancaster University, accessed June 4, 2019, http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/shakespeare-and-his-sisters/
- 27.
The poem “Had I loved butt att that rate” (ii.30), a song purportedly written by Amphilanthus when he was in love with Antissia, but sung by Pamphilia, is attributed to William Herbert in a number of manuscripts, see ii.481–82; Hannay, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth, 246–47; Gavin Alexander, “The Musical Sidneys,” John Donne Journal 25 (2006): 65–105. For a full discussion of Herbert’s poems and Wroth’s responses, see Mary Ellen Lamb, “‘Can you suspect a change in me’: Poems by Mary Wroth and William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke,” in Re-Reading Mary Wroth, ed. Katherine R. Larson, Naomi J. Miller, and Andrew Strycharski (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 53–68.
- 28.
See esp. Crawford, Mediatrix, 182
- 29.
See i.326–27; see also the edition of the poem in Mary Wroth, The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 163–64. Manuscript and printed versions can be compared in my online edition, Mary Wroth’s Poetry: An Electronic Edition. Latrobe University. https://www.wroth.latrobe.edu.au/
- 30.
For an especially influential example, see Michelle O’Callaghan, “The Shepheard’s Nation”: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).
- 31.
On this situation see Sanchez’s apt account of this as a queer ménage a trois, Sanchez, Erotic Subjects, 141–42.
- 32.
On this aspect of romance see the classic account by Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
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Salzman, P. (2020). The Politics of Complaint in Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory and The Second Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. In: Ross, S., Smith, R. (eds) Early Modern Women's Complaint. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42946-1_7
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