Abstract
Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions in the making until Silvesta replaces Musella’s drawn dagger with a potion that she describes as “fitter means to wed you to your grave.”1 Rather than resulting in death, however, Silvesta’s solution handily averts a Romeo and Juliet-style ending, grants the victory to Venus, and greatly improves the marital options of the star-crossed lovers and several others in the process. This seems the stock stuff that pastoral comedy is made of—that is, until we interrogate the crucial phrase “fitter means to wed,” particularly as it applies to women. Wroth’s implied criticism of traditional marital practices is still more intriguing when taken in conjunction with Margaret Hannay’s recent claim that Love’s Victory was written for the wedding of Wroth’s younger sister Barbara in the spring of 1619.2 This raises a number of questions about how Wroth’s personal experiences and her hopes for her sister’s union informed the play, shaping its contentions about the alterations to convention necessary for women to engage more successfully in the marriage market. Why might Wroth have written this particular play for Barbara? What was she hoping to convey to her about the institution of marriage? And what exactly are the more suitable means for marrying that Wroth proposes?
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Notes
Lady Mary Wroth, Love’s Victory, in Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents, ed. S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (London: Routledge, 1996), 5.4.58. Subsequent references are to this edition.
Margaret P. Hannay, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 221; hereafter MSLW.
Ibid., 145. Enfield and Surrenden have also been suggested as possible locations. Josephine Roberts, “The Huntington Manuscript of Lady Mary Wroth’s Play, Loves Victorie,” HLQ 46, no. 2 (1983): 163;
Barbara K. Lewalski, “Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory and Pastoral Tragicomedy,” in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 88;
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): 63–4n39; and Hannay, MSLW, 221.
Robert Sidney to Barbara Gamage Sidney, [October 10] 1604, in Domestic Politics and Family Absence: The Correspondence (1588–1621) of Robert Sidney, First Earl of Leicester, and Barbara Gamage Sidney, Countess of Leicester, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 123.
Published versions run this postscript into the body of the letter. See Hannay et al., Domestic Politics, 123; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord De L’Isle & Dudley Preserved at Penshurst Place, ed. William A. Shaw (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1936), 3: 140.
Naomi J. Miller, Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 165–6, 181;
Ina Habermann, “Femininity between Praise and Slander,” in her Staging Slander and Gender in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 98.
Gary Waller, “‘Like One in a Gay Masque’: The Sidney Cousins in the Theaters of Court and Country,” in Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama: Criticism, History, and Performance 1594–1998, ed. S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (London: Routledge, 1998), 234–9.
Both the Bisham Entertainment and the masque of eight ladies for Anne Russell’s wedding serve as instructive examples from noble households. Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell, The Writings of an English Sappho, ed. Patricia Phillippy (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2011), 147–57, 270–6. See also Robert White, “Cupid’s Banishment: A Maske Presented to Her Majesty,” in Renaissance Drama by Women, 82–9.
Hannay, “Sleuthing in the Archives: The Life of Lady Mary Wroth,” chapter 1 in this volume. See Roberts, “Huntington Manuscript,” 166–7; Cerasano and Wynne-Davies, introduction to Love’s Victory, in Renaissance Drama by Women, 94; and Wynne-Davies, “‘Here is a sport,’” and Women Writers and Familial Discourse in the English Renaissance: Relative Values (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007), 100–2.
Silvesta has been noted repeatedly as a powerful female figure. See Miller, Changing the Subject, 130–2, 168; Margaret Anne McLaren, “An Unknown Continent: Lady Mary Wroth’s Forgotten Pastoral Drama, ‘Loves Victorie,’” in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print, ed. Anne Haselkorn and Betty Travitsky (Amherst: University ofMassachusetts Press, 1990), 276–92, rpt. in Cerasano and Wynne-Davies, Readings, 227. Wynne-Davies links Silvesta to the Countess ofBedford. See Familial Discourse, 100–2.
Josephine A. Roberts, “Deciphering Women’s Pastoral: Coded Language in Wroth’s Love’s Victory,” in Representing Women in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 172–3.
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© 2015 Katherine R. Larson and Naomi J. Miller with Andrew Strycharski
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Van Note, B.M. (2015). Performing “fitter means”: Marriage and Authorship in Love’s Victory. In: Larson, K.R., Miller, N.J., Strycharski, A. (eds) Re-Reading Mary Wroth. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137473349_5
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