Poetry

Abstract

I have discussed Rachel Speght’s poetry in Chapter 2 and Mary Wroth’s prose romance, Urania, in Chapter 3. Here I return to Wroth in a consideration of the remarkable sequence of poems appended to the incomplete published text of Urania. While I have read Urania, in the context of its publication in 1621, as a political act by Wroth, the appended song and sonnet sequence offers a complex engagement with a poetic genre that would have seemed to many readers to be on its last legs, if not passé. The characters depicted in Urania often produce songs and poems, replicating the way that Jacobean aristocrats, such as Mary Wroth and her cousin and lover William Herbert (who are represented in the romance in the figures of Pamphilia and Amphilanthus), were expected to have some poetic facility. In particular, Wroth’s alter-ego, Pamphilia, is depicted as a poet, and as well as occasional verse written during the narrative, Pamphilia is the ‘author’ of the song and sonnet sequence that follows the incomplete book four of the romance. ‘Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’ is a sequence that, for the reader of Urania, fulfils the nature of the relationship between the thwarted Pamphilia and her wayward lover Amphilanthus. Indeed, the sonnet sequence could be seen as a kind of conclusion to the published romance, in so far as it explores the emotional and psychological state of its main female character (though it is worth noting that other women in the romance also write poems, notably Urania and Antissia, who are very different from Pamphilia, and this difference is also evident in the kind of poetry they write).KeywordsLiterary CultureEarly Modern PeriodManuscript CollectionTravel NarrativeChrist Church CollegeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.