Pastoral, Temperance, and the Unitary Self in Wroth's Urania

Abstract

Mary Wroth's Urania is usually described as a "pastoral romance," but there has been little attention given to that qualifying adjective other than to say that Wroth's work is a reworking of Philip Sidney's (at least partly) pastoral Arcadia. 1 Wroth's deployment of pastoral is certainly in part an answer to Arcadia's--one oft-noted example is her decision to open the romance with a declaration of presence by a shepherdess with the same name as she whose absence is lamented so eloquently by Strephon and Claius in the opening of the New Arcadia--but Urania's exploration of pastoral as a narrative tool is also firmly rooted in Jacobean theories of pastoral and tragicomedy. In this essay, I want to read Urania's pastoralism not as a gesture of nostalgia for a dying Elizabethan mode, but instead as an intervention in what critics and historians have recently been demonstrating to be a thriving Stuart debate about the scope and abilities of pastoral. 2 Wroth's romance proposes its version of pastoral temperance as a way for women in particular to embrace an ideal of constancy that allows for both rigor and openness to the flux of experience, and for pastoral itself, in a sometimes hostile climate, to maintain some of its time-honored virtues.