The Myth of the Countess of Pembroke: The Dramatic Circle

Abstract

Writing about literary circles has always been a tricky business, and writing about literary circles in the Renaissance has proved singularly unfortunate. First the Areopagus, a circle supposedly dedicated to the promotion of quantitative verse in English, was invented from a chance remark of Spenser's, grounds soon generally recognized as exceedingly flimsy.' Then the School of Night, a group devoted to the study of science and suspected of atheism, was born from a phrase in Love's Labour's Lost and from ingenious identifications of the characters of that play with real persons of the time.2 Finally, from the same period of turn-of-the-century criticism emerged the Countess of Pembroke's dramatic circle, a concept which has continued to flourish. It is the purpose of this article to expose the unlikelihood of the existence of this group as it has been described in the critical literature. My motive is not to point out the flaws in the work of an older generation of critics who, after all, made tremendous contributions to our understanding of Renaissance literature, but to assess more accurately the Countess of Pembroke's actual influence on dramatic works. Patronage, or at least the hope for patronage, was a vital force in the work of many Renaissance