Abstract
How did Mary Wroth conceive of poetry, of authorship, and of herself as an author? Several scholars have considered from a biographical and psychological standpoint what it might have meant for her to be embedded within the distinguished Sidney family.1 Of special concern to a budding writer like Wroth would be how those family members exemplified authorial roles and patronage and how their works might serve as literary models. Wroth would have known the unpublished sonnet sequence by her father, Sir Robert Sidney, first Earl of Leicester, and the manuscript poems produced by her aunt, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke.2 She certainly knew and responded to poems by her cousin and lover William Herbert, Mary’s son and heir to the Pembroke title.3 Also she knew most or all of the works, widely circulated in manuscript and print, by her famous uncle Sir Philip Sidney—The Defence of Poesie (1595), Astrophil and Stella (1595), the unpublished Old Arcadia, the unfinished New Arcadia (1590), and the often published combined version (1593 and after).4 One notable case of Wroth’s imitation of Philip Sidney invites particular attention. Both authors reveal something of their conception of the authorial role through fictional representations of poets and storytellers, including themselves, in their prose romances: Sidney’s Arcadias and Wroth’s two-part Urania.5
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Notes
See, for example, Margaret P. Hannay, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010);
Gary F. Waller, The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of Gender (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1993);
Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). See also chapter 1, by Margaret P. Hannay, in this volume.
Robert Sidney’s sequence, Rosis and Lysa, was inscribed “To the Countess of Pembroke.” See The Poems of Robert Sidney, ed. P. J. Croft (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
See also Margaret P. Hannay, “‘Your vertuous and learned Aunt’: The Countess of Pembroke as a Mentor to Mary Wroth,” in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary F. Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 15–34.
See Gavin Alexander, Writing after Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney 1586–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (London, 1595: Scolar Facsimile, 1971), sig. B1v. 8. Ibid., sig. Cr. 9. Ibid., sig. C3v.
“To my dear lady and sister,” in The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 3. All subsequent references in the text will be to this edition.
Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
See also James M. Osborn, Young Philip Sidney, 1572–1577 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 496–522. Sidney had apparently incurred the queen’s distrust, in part over his support of a forward Protestant agenda in Europe and (perhaps) a letter he wrote opposing her proposed marriage with the Duc d’Alençon.
William A. Ringler Jr., ed., The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), lvii–lviii.
William A. Ringler Jr., ed., The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), lvii–lviii.
The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, Written by Sir Philip Sidney Knight. Now since the first edition augmented and ended (London, 1593). See Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 70–7.
The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (London, 1621); all citations in text and notes are to The First Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Binghamton, NY: RETS/MRTS, 1995).
Barbara K. Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 243–90.
Citations of the poems in the text and notes are from The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), which retains Wroth’s orthography and pointing from manuscript sources.
The Newberry manuscript copy of Part Two (Case MS 1565.W95) is the only source of the modern edition, The Second Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts, completed by Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller (Tempe, AZ: RETS/ACMRS, 1999). All citations are to this edition. The manuscript is carefully described in the editors’ introduction.
Roberts discusses this poem in Poems, 217, noting its attribution to William Herbert in three British Library manuscripts. See also Gavin Alexander, “The Musical Sidneys,” John Donne Journal 25 (2006): 65–105.
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© 2015 Katherine R. Larson and Naomi J. Miller with Andrew Strycharski
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Lewalski, B.K. (2015). Authorship and Author-Characters in Sidney and Wroth. In: Larson, K.R., Miller, N.J., Strycharski, A. (eds) Re-Reading Mary Wroth. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137473349_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137473349_3
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