Abstract
I must needs thinke, nay beeleeve, that destiny hath onely power in this adventure, otherwaise I could nott (miserable I cowld nott) have hapined soe well.1
I am honored to contribute to this re-reading of Mary Wroth, not least because it has made me realize just how closely tied my career has been to discovering, reading, teaching, and brooding over—and finding unpredicted ways of writing about—her life and writings. We all have authors, poems, or music that affect us in deeply personal ways, not always consciously: no doubt some Shakespeare scenes reverberate for me because of experiences in my childhood, and some aspects of Mary Wroth’s life and works uncannily have also had that affect. Julia Kristeva comments that the Virgin Mary provides a mysterious hole (le trou de la Vierge) within the Christian discourse of women and motherhood, which believers and non-believers have variously filled.2 Mary Wroth has occupied an analogous place for me as I have wrestled with the intersections of sexuality, gender roles, and language within my own versions of what I have termed the Sidney Family Romance.
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Notes
Lady Mary Wroth, 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), 2.
The Female Poets of Great Britain, ed. Frederic Rowton (London: Henry C. Beard, 1856), 49–50.
Margaret Anne Witten-Hannah [McLaren], “Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania: The Work and the Tradition” (PhD diss., University of Auckland, 1978).
Lady Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, ed. G. F. Waller (Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1977);
The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 62, 73.
Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Stephen Conway, Erica Carter, and Chris Turner, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1988, 1989);
Louise Kaplan, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Madame Bovary (New York: Doubleday, 1991).
Gary Waller, “The Sidney Family Romance: Random, Undocumented Scenes,” Sidney Journal 11 (1990): 17–27;
Waller, Other Flights Always (Biddeston: Merlin Press, 1990).
Gary Waller, The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of Gender (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 147.
Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, ed. Lewis Soens (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 9.
Brian O’Farrell, Shakespeare’s Patron: William Herbert Third Earl of Pembroke 1580–1630 (London: Continuum, 2011), 45; for the Clarendon remark, see Waller, Family Romance, 77.
Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Arden, 2012), 151.
Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 11.
M. Masud Khan, Alienation in Perversions (London: Hogarth Press, 1979), 212.
Mary Jacobus, First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1995), 7.
The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 165.
O’Farrell’s biography of Pembroke is regrettably superficial and, despite being published in 2011, barely acknowledges the past 40 years of scholarship on Pembroke and Wroth, since it was first written as a dissertation in 1966. Margaret Hannay’s meticulous accounting records no definite connections between the two in the 1620s, the latest being Pembroke’s help in finding Mary a house to rent in London in 1620. See Hannay, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 228; hereafter, MSLW.
The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997) 93–4.
Poems of William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke … and Sir Benjamin Rudyard: Written in the Time of King James I and King Charles I, ed. Sir Egerton Brydges (London: Bensley, 1817), a reprint of Poems written by the Right Honourable William Earl of Pembroke … whereof many of which are answered, by way of repartee, by Sr. Benjamin Ruddier, Knight (London: Matthew Inman, 1660). For discussions of the canon of Pembroke’s poems, see Robert Krueger, “The Poems of William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke” (BLitt thesis, Oxford University, 1961). See also Mary Ellen Lamb, “‘Can you suspect a change in me?’: Poems by Mary Wroth and William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke,” chapter 3 in this volume.
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© 2015 Katherine R. Larson and Naomi J. Miller with Andrew Strycharski
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Waller, G. (2015). “To beeleeve this but a fiction and dunn to please and pass the time”: Re-Imagining Mary Wroth and William Herbert in Feigning Poetry. In: Larson, K.R., Miller, N.J., Strycharski, A. (eds) Re-Reading Mary Wroth. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137473349_17
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