“Many Ciphers, Although But One for Meaning”: Lady Mary Wroth’s Many-Sided Monogram

Abstract

This essay proposes a reinterpretation of Lady Mary Wroth’s cryptic monogram based on the discovery of the first extant printed book from her personal library: an early seventeenth-century edition of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. After an autograph manuscript of Wroth’s pastoral drama, the Penshurst Loves Victorie, Cyropaedia is only the second extant volume bearing her monogram. The symbol, whose letters unscramble to spell the names of Wroth’s fictional personae for herself and her lover, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, has long been a site of negotiation between her life and fiction. That negotiation is ongoing and more flexible than previously thought. Putting bibliography into conversation with monogramming moments in the Urania, this essay revises past readings of the monogram, arguing that the cipher incurs a shift in meaning across the two surviving volumes on which it features, from romantic to elegiac. Along the way, the essay identifies Wroth’s bookbinder for the first time and locates her within networks of material exchange. These analyses suggest a provenance for the Cyropaedia, that it was a gift copy for William, Wroth’s son by Herbert. The never-ending story of Wroth’s monogram is an example of the complex dialogue between text and physical object which is abroad in the early modern period more generally. [V.B.]