Wroth Urania

MARY T R U L L
“Philaps’ House Is Not in All Places”: Mam’age, Privacy,

and the Overheard Lament in Mary Wroth’s Urania
n 1621 the bookstalls of London featured an unusual offering: T h e

Countess ofhilontgomery’s Urunia, a romance that only thinly veiled
its autobiographical tales of illicit love. More startling, the title-page
announced the author as “the right honorable the Lady Mary Wroath,
Daughter to the right Noble Robert Earle of Leicester, and Neece to the
ever famous, and renowned Sir Phillips Sidney knight. And to the most
exelent Lady Mary Countesse of Pembroke late deceased.” Uruniu was
not only unique as an English work of fiction by a woman; it also trum-
peted its author’s extraordinary social position and family connections.
Although Wroth claimed not to have intended its publication, Urunia’s
exposure of its author could hardly have been more daring, given the
time’s biases against print publication, against women reading-much
less, writing-romances, and against women as extramarital lovers. The
book met with anger and mockery, forcing the author to apologize and
withdraw it from circulation.2 Wroth’s foray into print contrasts sharply
with her heroines’ view of public exposure: they hide the contents of
their hearts and the products of their pens. Queen Pamphilia, Uruniu’s
For invaluable advice on this essay I thank David Bevington, Jane1 Mueller, and Joshua Scodel,
as well as Michael Murrin, Richard Strier, and a reader for ELR.
I . O n Urania’s publication, see Josephine Roberts’ “Textual Introduction,” The First Part of
The Countess ojMongonrery’s lirania (Binghaniton, NY, 1995).All references to the First Part will
indicate this edition.
2. In a well-known letter to the Duke of Buckinghani, Wroth stated that she never intended
to publish, but the claim is belied by the fact that she had presented him with a copy ofthe book.
See Josephine Roberts, “Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania: A Response to Jacobean Censorship,” in
Neio Ways $ h o k i n g at Old Texts, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghaniton, NY, 1993).pp. 125-29; and
Rosalind Smith, “Lady Mary Wroth’s Puniphilia to Amphilanthrrs: The Politics of Withdrawal,”
English Literary Renai-tsanre 3 0 (zooo), 408-3 I .
459
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Oxford 0x4 zDQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA oz14X. USA.
460 English Literary Renaissance
most avid poet, is the “most distressed, secret, and constant Lover,” who
“never in all her extreniest sufferings” tells her story outright, but with-
draws for self-communion to a bower as “delicate without, as shee was
faire, and darke within as her sorrowes” (pp. 90-01).Wroth compares
Pamphilia to her garden because the beauty of both consists in privacy: a
decorous exterior promises wonders while resolutely concealing them.
Urania places immense value on women’s resistance to publicity, but it
insistently stages the overcoming of such reluctance in scenes of eaves-
dropping that allow the revelation of heroines’ secret desires, paralleling
Wroth’s own self-disclosure.
Jeff Masten and Nona Fienberg have each argued that Wroth discloses
a new stance of female authorship, making the “private self” a source of
authority in opposition to a Petrarchan tradition of publicly competitive
masculine authorship.3 Wroth’s female poets, all lamenters of lost love,
locate authentic feeling and the right to speak in the privileged space of
retirement. Nevertheless, critics have begun to reevaluate Wroth’s
conception of authorship, privilegmg her interest in public discourses
both within the fictional world of Urania and in the text’s alliances with
contemporary genres. Since Josephine Roberts’ initial exploration of
Wroth’s far-rangng influences, Urania has emerged as a work of remark-
ably creative intertextuality that engages with public culture in diverse
ways.4 Paul Salzman and Ann Rosalind Jones have both portrayed
Wroth as a comnientator on court culture and contemporary politics,
3. Jeff Masten, “‘Shall I turne blabb?’: Circulation, Gender, and Subjectivity in Wroth’s
Sonnets,” in Readin‘y Mary Wroth:Representing AIternativrs in Early M o d e r n E q l a n d , ed. Naoini J .
Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville, 1991).pp. 57-87; Nona Fienberg, “Mary Wroth and the
lnvention of Female Poetic Subjectivity,” i n Miller and Waller, pp. 175-90. Daniel Juan Gil
responds to Masten with a tightly argued reading of the poems showing Wroth deliberately
taking the status not of private subject, but of publicly circulating object-a parodic violation of
conventional authorship. Gil, “The Currency o f the Beloved and the Authority of Lady Mary
Wroth,” Modcrrr L a n p q y c Studies a9 (1999),73-92, See also Maureen Quilligan, “The Constant
Subject: Imtability and Feiiiale Authority i n Wroth’s Urania Poeins,” in Soliciting Irzfrrprc~fatron:
Literary 7%rory arid Srventrerrth Century Englislr Poetry, ed. Elizabeth 11. Harvey and Katharine
Eisanian Maus (Chicago. logo), pp. 307-35.
4. For a comprehensive view ofWroth’s innovative approach to genre, see Barbara Lewdlski,
“Kevising Genres and Claiming the Woman’s Part: Mary Wroth’s Otwvrr,” Writitg Wonten in
jartihean Enylnnd (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), pp. 243-308. O n global geography in Urnuia, see
Sheila T. Cavanagh, Clierislicd 7;mrrrxt: Tlw Ernotiorrnl Certqraphy ($L a d y M a r y Wroth’s Urania
(Pittsburgh, aooi). O n Wroth’s use of texts from Iberian romance? to medieval saints’ lives to
domestic chores, see Helen Hackett, “Lady Mary Wroth’s Urarria,” Wottreri and Roniarrce Firtiorz irr
the Enqlish Renuissunre (Canibridge. Eng., zooo), pp. I 59-82,
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Mary Trull 461
while Nona Fienberg has revised her earlier position, finding in Wroth’s
poetry “public markers” referring to the Jacobean social world. Jones has
depicted Wroth as a patron of politically-minded writers and has found
in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, the sonnet sequence appended to Urunia,
an oppositional stance toward the Jacobean regime.‘ The split in critical
positions must derive in part from Wroth’s own contradictory view of
privacy and public exposure, a conflict most evident in the eavesdropping
scenes in which her heroines’ private laments are overheard by a
wondering audience. In her use of overheard laments, Wroth explores
the volatile and shifting border between the private and the public;
moreover, she addresses the contradictions implicit in her culture’s
construction of the marital household.’
Wroth radically changed the themes permissible in Renaissance
romance. Her male predecessors in the genre of pastoral romance
marginalized women’s extramarital desire, celebrating male passion and
female chastity, and ridiculing the socially ostracized “fallen” woman.
Wroth revived an idealization of adultery reminiscent of Arthurian
romance, using it to critique the social institution of marriage and its
effects on both husbands and wives. Such themes are foreign to pastoral
romance but at home in a very different genre of Wroth’s era: the
narrative verse tradition of fallen women’s laments, such as those ofJane
Shore and Rosamond. Wroth both deploys and critiques the overheard
lament, adapting it for new purposes as she satirizes the male tradition of
eroticizing female laments. As in fallen women’s laments, in Urunia the
autonomous privacy in which women lament contrasts with social
spaces they do not control-particularly, the institutions of marriage and
concubinage.
5 . Paul Salznian, “The Strang(e) Constructions of Mary Wroth’s Urania: Arcadian Romance
and the Public Realm,” in English Renaissance Prose: History, Languqt, and Politics, ed. Neil
Rhodes (Tempe, Ariz, I y97), pp. 109-24;and “Transformations of Romance,” Literary Culture
in]acohean England: Reading 1621 (New York, zooz), pp. 64-81. Ann Rosalind Jones, “Designing
Women: The Selfas Spectacle in Mary Wroth and Veronica Franco,” in Miller and Waller, pp. I 3 5-
53. Nona Fienberg discusses Wroth’s use of Protestant rhetoric, the geographic and socio-
political context ofKent, and Anne Cecil’s s o ~ ~ n eofmourning
ts in “Mary Wroth’s Poetics o f t h e
Self,” Studies in EnXlish Literature 42 (2002), 121-36.
6. Smith, “Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amqd-danthrrs.”
7. Similarly, Linda L. Dove argues that Wroth’s poetry plays upon the analogy between the
family and the state in contemporary sociopolitical theory. Dove, “Mary Wroth and the Politics
o f t h e Household in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” in Women, Writin2and the Reproduction of Culture
in Tudor and Stuart Brifain, ed. Mary E. Burke et al. (Syracuse, ~ O O O ) pp.
, 141-56.
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Tracing Wroth’s alliances with several key genres reveals her search
for new ways to imagine women’s relation to marriage.8 Like Arthurian
romance, Urunia glorifies adulterous love as an escape from the social
constrictions of marriage. But in investigating the effects of marriage
upon wives and husbands, Wroth moves beyond both the sentimental
tragedy of fallen-women’s laments and the utopian aura of adultery in
earlier romance. Here we find a complex depiction ofwomen’s sexuality
and a disillusioned view of marriage similar to that of fallen women’s
laments; but Wroth’s laments are set in the magcal landscape ofromance.
Annabel Patterson has shown that seventeenth-century English romance
came steadily closer to embracing forthright topical allusion by mixing
fact and fantasy, commentaries on contemporary life and fabulous mar-
vels.” I hope to c l a r i ~
Mary Wroth’s role in this process by showing that
her analysis of domestic relations works as a kind of domestic allegory.
She balances an idealistic view of love with a prescient realism in her
depiction of sexual exploitation and adultery. Her use of the lament, a
well-worn Renaissance genre, creates a rich and realistic social context
for women’s expressions of grief, contrasting the private spaces where
desire is expressed with the oppressively public spaces of the marital
household.
In Uruniu the convention of female lament that is given over to escapist
themes in pastoral romance reflects instead the problematic household
relations of Wroth’s own experience.”’ Uruniu’s illicit lovers repeatedly
mirror Wroth’s biography and her illicit love affair; in treating extra-
marital love, she was doubtless rewriting earlier phases of her own love for
an inconstant partner, her cousin William Herbert. Wroth endured an
arranged marriage to a husband said to be jealous and churlish, and after
his death she bore two children to Herbert, who had several other affairs
8. Similarly, Rebecca Laroche argues that Parnphilia to Aniphilantlirs fuses aspects of Philip
Sidney’s and Shakespeare’s sonnet sequences to create new emotional complexities. Laroche,
“Pamphilia Across a Crowded Room: Mary Wroth’s Entry into Literary History,” Gcrirt. 30
(l997), 267-88.
9. Annabel Patterson, “The Royal Roniance,” Ctworship and Interpretation: The Conditioris of
Wrifinf arid Reading in Early Modem England (Madison, Wisc., 1984). pp. 1 5 p - 2 0 2 .
10. Jennifer Lee Carrell goes further than this, arguing that Urariia deconstructs the distinction
between truth and fiction, while Christina Luckyj argues that Wroth used her autobiography in
the service of both poetic imitation and didactic moral criticism. Carrell, “A Pack of Lie5 in a
Looking Glass: Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and the Magic Mirror ofRonlance,” Studies in EnXlith
Literature 34 (1994).79-107; Luckyj, “The Politics of Genre in Early Women’s Writing: T h e
Case of Lady Mary Wroth,” Erylish Studies iri Canada 27 (2oo1), 253-82.
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Mury Trull 463
and cut off Wroth’s children from inheritance.” Gary Waller concludes
that “Uruniu is thus the enactment of a fantasy of resentment and desire
for something more fulfilling than her society has assigned her as a
woman.”’* Although Wroth’s idealized view of illicit love seems to
deserve Waller’s charge of wish-fulfillment, such an account neglects her
complex and innovative intertextuality, reducing her use of romantic
motifs to mere escapism. Wroth attends to the persuasive power of
familiar romance motifs to move audiences, while transforming the ear-
lier literary tradition’s representation of illicit love. In U r d u illicit love,
like poetry, can create a private refuge, a fantasy space sheltering women
from abusive exposure; but Wroth insistently stages the violation of such
spaces. The overheard lament itself creates a dialectic between poetic
privacy and the pleasure-for poet and audience-of its transgression. In
a sense Wroth’s many lamenting heroines are lamenting for her, and the
Uruniu itself constitutes an intentionally overheard lament. She sketches
a model for the reception of her complaint in the sympathy that Uruniu’s
audiences yield to its lamenting women. l 3
I1
Louis Montrose has remarked of Spenser’s “episodes of interrupted inti-

macy” that “here the private is not merely defined by its juxtaposition to
I I . For a thorough biography, see Roberts’ introduction, Urania, pp. lxxix-xcviii. See also
Lewalski. O n autobiographical aspects of lirania, see Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Biopolitics ofRomance
in Mary Wroth’s T h e Countess .f Mon@omery’s Urania,” English Literary Renaissance 3 I (zoor),
107-30; and Marion Wynne-Davies, “‘So Much Worth’: Autobiographical Narrative5 in the
Work of Lady Mary Wroth,” in Befrayin‘q Oiir Selves: Forms i$Sejf-Representation in Early Modern
English Tcxts, ed. Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway, and Helen Wilcox (New York, zooo), pp. 76-
93. Akiko Kusonoki usefully conipares Wroth’s experience to that of other court ladies who
pursued extraniarital liaisonc in “Female Selfhood and Male Violence in English Ikenaissance
Drama: A View from Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Wotnen, Violence, and English Renaissance Literafure:
Essays Honoring P a d Jorgensen, ed. Linda Woodbridge and Sharon A. Beehler (Tempe, Ariz.,
2003), pp. 126-48.
12. Waller, The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern
Construction of Gender (Detroit, 1993) p. 2 5 6 . Similarly, Anne Shaver argues that Wroth’s
verisimilar fiction corrects the disappointments she experienced firsthand. Shaver, “Agency and
Marriage in the Fictions of Lady Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle,”
in Pikrimagefor Love: Essays in Early Modern Literafure in Honor ofJosephine A. Roberts, ed. Sigrid
King (Tempe, Ariz., iygy), pp. 177-90.
1 3 . In Chzder and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison, Wisc., 1990), Mary Ellen Lamb
points out the analogy between the synipathetic bond created by lainenters and audiences within
the text and that between Urania and its readers (pp. 178-8 I ) .
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the public; it becomes apprehensible precisely in the moment of its vio-
l a t i ~ n . ”Scenes
’~ in which a woman’s poetic introspection is interrupted
by an eavesdropper became central in three of Wroth’s most important
influences,Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana (1559) and Gil Polo’s Enamored
Diana (I 564) and Philip Sidney’s T h e Countess ofl‘embroke’s Arcadia (I 590).
Their predecessor,Jacopo Sannazaro’sArcadia (1489),firmly links poetic
expression to the interiority of the self. Sannazaro’s lovelorn narrator,
“knowing myself to have something else in my breast that it did not
behoove me to show outwardly,” titles himself “Sincero” and runs off to
the wilds, “fleeing the society of shepherds, to be the better able to think
upon my troubles in solitary place^."'^ For “Sincero” and Sannazaro’sother
poet-shepherds, poetic solitude is merely a rhetorical theme; although they
have much to say on authentic feeling and its proper expression in solitude,
they say it in public, and often as part of a competitive exchange ofverses.
Later, Montemayor devised an ingenious solution to this incongruity:
Diana’s plot advances through the overhearing of private laments. In Diana
the overheard lament amounts to a new narrative technology that radically
alters plot structure as well as the thematics of privacy and poetry.
The typical scene of poetic exertion in the Dianas and Sidney’s Arcadid
is not a festive competition as in Sannazaro, but invaded privacy.
Moreover, while Sannazaro’s women are silent love objects whose
beauty inspires poets’ praises, in Montemayor’s and Polo’s Diana, women
emerge as powerful creators of poetry, whose modesty imbues poetry
with a unique authenticity when their laments are overheard. The first
overheard lament occurs when Sylvanus and Syrenus discuss the beauty
of Diana, Syrenus’ beloved. Sylvanus remarks that she might have
aroused “excessive desire” if a man less continent than himself had
witnessed her “sitting with thee neere to yon little brooke, when she was
kembing her golden haire, and thou holding the glasse unto her . . .
though neither of you both did (perhaps) know that I espied you from
those high bushes, neere to the two great okes, keeping (yet) in mind the
verses, that thou sungest upon the holding of the glasse.”“ The “excessive”
14. Louis A. Montrose, “Spenser’s Domestic Domain: Poetry, Property, and the Early Modem
Subject,” Subject and Object in Remissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan,
and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge, Eng., 1996), pp. 83-129.
1 5 . Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcudia G Piscatorial Eclogues, tr. Ralph Nash (Detroit, rg66), p. 7 3 .
16. A Critical Edition cf Yong’s Translation of George ofhlontenrayor’s Diana and Gil Polo’s Enam-
oured Diana, ed. Judith M . Kennedy (Oxford, 196R), pp. 18-19. Further references to the Dianas
will be taken from this edition.
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Mary Tvull 46s
erotic charge in this story derives from Sylvanus’ violation of several
layers of, or figures for, privacy. He perceives Diana’s beauty as that
which is contemplated first by herself in the mirror, and next by her
lover, Syrenus, who observes her observing herself. Montemayor por-
trays Sylvanus as an avid consumer of Syrenus’ verses through-even, as
a result of-his intrusion on the lovers’ privacy. The episode dwells at
length on Sylvanus’ minutely described hiding place and his laborious
memorization of Syrenus’ poem; intrusion seems to have raised the
value of both the verses and Diana’s beauty. The scene of eavesdropping
thus transfers the question of poetic value from the poet’s attainment of
certain rhetorical standards to the conditions of poetic reception. The
poem overheard at the cost of overcoming layers of intimacy-or the
poem that suggests such a forced revelation-gains credibility and allure.
In this scene the triangular relation between woman, poet-lover, and
voyeur lends poetry a seductive aura of violated privacy.” But eaves-
dropping on a solitary woman lost in the throes oflove melancholy pro-
vides a richer opportunity for voyeuristic pleasure, and a more enticing
analogue for poetic performance and reception. When the shepherd
band accidentally intrudes upon Belisa in bed, Montemayor describes at
length her carelessly displayed body and manifest despair (pp. 108-09).
The nymphs and shepherds are “so anlazed at her beautie, and at her
inward sorrow” that they shed sympathetic tears. Even though Belisa is
not reciting verses here, the display of private sorrow that is both pitiful
and seductive will emerge as a key theme in the portrayal of poets.
Sidney imitates the Belisa incident when Pyrocles enters Philoclea’s
bedroom, where she is meticulously described in a seductive posture of
despair-like Belisa, she lies on her bed in a translucent smock, one leg
left bare. Sidney, however, allows Pyrocles to overhear Philoclea utter-
ing two elaborately innovative sonnets, “with some art curiously written
to enwrap her secret and resolute woes.”’xPhiloclea’s artful poems are
like her “fair smock wrought all in flames of ash-colour silk and gold,”
which “enwraps” her bodily beauty while exposing it to the eager
17. Wendy Wall discuses the voyeuristic reader as a convention of Petrarchan poetry, which
strongly influenced pastoral romance; in the late sixteenth century they may be considered par-
allel and niutually influential trad~tioiis.Wall, “Prefatorial Disclosures: ‘Violent Enlargement’ and
the Voyruristic Text,” The fmprinr of Gender: Authorship und Pddicutiiin in the Eqiish Renuissunrc
(Ithaca, 1993), pp. 169-226.
1 8 . The Corrnfcss ofPcmOroke’s Arm& ( T h e Old Arrddia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford, 1973).
p. 229.
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observer. The poems beautify her sorrow not only by giving it a splendid
setting, but also by partially obscuring, and therefore highlighting, the
nakedness of emotion. Eavesdropping resolves the conflict between
authenticity and art, since the solitary lament appears unquestionably
real. In scenes of female lament the juxtapositions of display and secrecy,
simplicity and artifice, and publicity and privacy characterize the seduc-
tiveness of poetry itself.”
Female lamenters thus became a locus of reflection on authorship and
privacy, a special case of the conflict between interior affect and its poetic
expression. This status is enabled by women’s roles as objects of visual
pleasure and their accompanying duty of modesty, which Sidney calls
“that tiresome familiar of womanlund” (p. 185). In Belisa’s and Philoclea’s
scenes, the sense of intrusion is intensified by the interrupted lamenter’s
shanie at her exposure-even if she has only displayed her woe.20This
feminine claim to special authorial status through modesty persists in
seventeenth-century women’s writing, becoming an explicit argument
in defense of women writing on amatory subjects. Madame de Scudiry
has her heroine Plotina assert women’s superiority in writing “exquisite”
love letters: “For a woman, in regard she never absolutely acknowledges
her love, but doth all things with a greater Mystery, this Love, whereof
there can only be a glynipse, causes a greater pleasure than that which is
apparent, and without ceremony.”” The “glympse” of the “Mystery” of
later seventeenth-century heroines’ love letters thus replicates in a new
form Sidney’s and Montemayor’s lonely lamenters and their partly
displayed, partly hidden beauty.
There is some potential for the ridiculous in all of this hiding and
exposing of bodies and poems, and Sidney gently satirizes Pyrocles’ (and
the assumed reader’s) transport at the display of suffering beauty. He
notes that Philoclea introduces her sonnet with a “pitiful but sweet
screech,” and that Pyrocles almost forgets that he has come to her
1 9 .HonorC. d’UrfC.’s L’Astrbc ( I 607-161 8). a pastoral romance in the same tradition as Diana
and Sidney’s Arradia, probably also influenced Wroth. Unlike Sidney, Montemayor, and Polo,
d’Urfi. has little interest in women as poets. and splits voyeuristic scenes involving women from
eavesdropping scenes, which focus on nien. d’Urf6 exposes the privacy of his niale lovers when
they are overheard uttering love laments, but he exposes women’s bodies rather than their
poetry, using elaborate scenes in which nien spy on women undressing in feminine retreats.
20. See, e.g., Diana’s confusion when her song is interrupted in Enanzoured Diana (p. 247).
2 1 . Clh1ia:An Exrellrnt NeuJRoniance (1678), tr. J. Daviec and G. Havers, Pt. 2 , p. 284, quoted
in Rosalind Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Worwen’s Amatory Fiction-from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford, I o p ) ,
p. 6 2 .
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Mary Tvull 467
bedroom for higher felicities than eavesdropping (p. 23 I ) . In another
eavesdropping scene Sidney satirizes women’s laments, having Cleophila-
Pyrocles witness Gynecia’s private complaint-to the intruder’s horror,
“with a cold sweat all over her, as if she had been ready to tread upon a
deadly stinging adder, she would have withdrawn herself”-but the
lamenter catches her unwilling voyeur and pleads for love, tearing her
clothes to expose her body (p. 183). In another parodic scene Musidorus
comes upon Miso, a rustic servant, “babbling to herself, and showing in
all her gestures that she was loathsomely weary of the world” (p. 189).
Miso is “sitting in the chimney’s end,” a debased version of the aristo-
cratic woman’s bedchamber as a setting for female privacy. In his
repeated mockery of such figures Sidney draws a distinction between his
heroines’ authentic, admirable laments and the repellent laments of fallen
women, who can only wish for the dignity of true suffering.
Perhaps Sidney alludes to a generic distinction between the refined
laments of romance and that other form of female lament, those per-
formed by fallen women in narrative verse and popular ballads. These
heroines are often king’s mistresses, who have traded their virtue for
wealth and social status rather than for love. Well before Sidney wrote
his Arcadia, The Mirror for Magistrates (1563 ed.) had made Jane Shore’s
lament famous, and fallen women’s laments continued in popularity
through the 1590’s and early I ~ O O ’ S , producing a group of heroines
whose status was alternately shameful and heroic. 22 Ballad literature
provided exposure often figured as demeaning; but fallen heroines also
appeared in narrative verse written in a high tragic style addressed to a
gentry audience, such as Thomas Churchyard’s in The Mirrorfor Magistrates,
Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece ( I 594), Michael Drayton’s England’s
Heroical Epistles (1597), and Thomas Middleton’s The Ghost of Lucrece
(1600).In Samuel Daniel’s The Complaint ofRosamond ( I 592), Rosamond’s
ghost, “attended with my shame that never sleepes,” is exiled from
eternal rest unless her tale of sexual exploitation can arouse sympathy in
living lovers.23Like Churchyard’s Jane Shore, Rosamond is portrayed as
having risen from the grave to tell her story directly to the audience,
claiming to cast modesty aside in a bid for sympathy. These dramas of
2 2 . See Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and “Female Comnplairit,” ed. John Kerrigan, (Oxford, 1991);
and Gotz Schmitz, The Fall of Women i n Early English Narrative Verse (Cambridge, Eng., 1090).
23. The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Samuel Daniel, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, (New
York, 1963), I, 8 1 , l . 3.
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468 English Litevavy Renuissance
modesty and confession bring to niind scenes of eavesdropping in pasto-
ral romance; here, too, the issue of poetic reception places opposing
constructions upon the female lamenter’s exposure to an audience. For
these female characters, pride in authorship vies with shame against a
harshly realistic backdrop of sexual exploitation and social injustice.
Again, violated privacy is at stake, but it connotes the bitter social con-
sequences of extramarital sexuality rather than the pleasure of aestheti-
cized transgression.
The fallen heroines speak of abuse by parents, husbands, and kings, of
sexual hypocrisy, and of shame, and their honesty and concern with gen-
der inequity create a powerful (although fictive) female autobiographical
voice. This voice serves to demonstrate the virtuosic versatility of the
male author, who writes himself into both Rosamond’s and Jane Shore’s
laments. Rosamond pleads with Daniel to turn from his own distress
(told in Sonnets to Delia) to publicize hers, and Jane Shore admits that the
glory of authoring her narrative will belong to Churchyard, while the
shame remains her own: “[Churchyard] shall not only haue the fame of
his owne worke (which no man can deny), but shall likewise haue all the
glory I can gieue him, if hee lend mee the hearing of my woeful1 tale, a
matter scarce fit for womans shaniefastnes to bewray. But since without
blushing I haue so long beene a talkatiue wench, (whose words a world
hath delighted in) I will now goe on boldly with my audacious manner:
and so step I on the stage in my shrowdeing sheete as I was buried.”24
Jane Shore’s public exposure designates her a “talkatiue wench,” “bold”
and “audacious,” while for Churchyard, also a lover and lamenter,
authorial fame signifies “glory.” Churchyard and Shore seem to compete
for the position of author: Shore’s words delight the world, but she
defers to Churchyard, a “writer of good continuance,” who will include
her tragic story with those of kings in the Mirrorfor Church-
yard emphasizes the immediacy of her narration by representing Shore
as the speaker and himself as hearer; she appears before him, then
declares that she is stepping on “the stage” to address us in her shroud.
Churchyard’s hand in the work is an absent one; he is quickly dismissed
24. This text prefaces the verses in the 1587 edition. See The Mirrorfi,r Magictrafes, ed. Lily B.
Canipbell (1938; N e w York, 196o), p. 372.
2 5 . See Mary Jo Kietznian on the female complaint as “a tool of poetic self-definition in the
English tradition since the fourteenth century,” In “‘What is Hecuba to Him or [Slhe to
Hecuba?’: Lucrece’s Complaint and Shakespearean Poetic Agency,” Modern Philulogy 07 ( I yyy),
25.
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Mary Trull 469
when Shore mounts the stage. The focus on Shore’s body, her distinc-
tive voice, and her presence make her the source of unordered feeling,
while the invisible Churchyard gets the role of skillful poet, a detached
framer of Shore’s passion. By thematizing the narrator’s shame, fallen
women’s laments locate the reader as witness to the unveiling of female
privacy, a position also presented as erotically transgressive even though,
as here, lamenters often directly address their readers.
111
Wroth’s overheard laments break decisively with the traditions of

pastoral romance; she employs popular verse, chivalric romance, and
Arthurian legends to give women’s privacy new contexts and inflections.
In a lengthy episode in which Philarchos is tempted to commit adultery,
Wroth spoofs the seductive modesty of the female lamenter made
conventional by Sidney and Montemayor. She rewrites the scene of
erotic eavesdropping so that the focus falls less on the erotic spectacle of
invaded female privacy than on the male eavesdropper’s conflicted feel-
ings about the conjugal household. The episode enacts both a skeptical
take on the concerns of her predecessors and a turn to Wroth’s central
interest in husbands’ and wives’ disparate experience of marriage.
By highlighting the conflict between marriage and desire, Wroth
makes Philarchos’ own possible sexual dishonor as central to the scene as
that of the lamenting lady.26Philarchos defines romantic narrative in
opposition to the conjugal household, where no adventures worth the
telling could tran~pire.~’Pressed to tell Pamphilia, Veralinda, and the
Queen of Naples of his recent activities, he notes that “To relate
houshould affaires ore businesses of that kinde [as] home-bred matters
wowld bee unfitting such excellent eares;” therefore, he tells of adultery’s
26. See also Helen Hackett’s analysis of voyeurism in Urarzia, which focuses on Wroth’s use
of women’s bodies in erotic display: “‘Yet Tell M e Some Such Fiction’: Lady Mary Wroth’s
Urania and the ‘Femininity’ of Romance,” in Early Women Writers: 1600-1 720, ed. Anita Pacheco
(London, ~ g g R )pp.
, 45-69.
27. The opposition between domesticity and adventure often structures chivalric romance,
most obviously in Chritien de Troyes’ Erec et Enide and Lr Chevalier au Lion, in which married
knights are derided for their domestic complacancy and must leave the household to regain
heroic stature. Sir Thomas Malory has Lancelot abjure marriage, for “to be a wedded man. . .
thenne I must couche with her, and leve arnis and turnenientyr, batayls, and adventures.”
Cmtodx Malory: A New Edition ofsir Thomas Malory’s Le Mofie D’Arthur,ed. James W. Spisak (Berkeley,
1983), p. 147, 11. 15-16,
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470 English Litevaiy Renaissance
temptations.28 Leaving “quiett rests att home” to search for the lost
infants, Philarchos went to the court of Licia, “a paradise of earthly
contents” where he is royally welcomed and plied with luxury and
entertainment until “truly ravished with itt.” The court tempts Philarchos
with food, music, and elaborate compliments paid by the royal host and
his beautiful daughter. Later, roused from bed by singing, Philarchos
views through a window the climax of the court’s beauties: not the prin-
cess and her bevy of “delicate ladys” but the arbor in which they sit, in
the center of which stands a fountain topped by, “as if a vaile,” “a blush-
ing rose, an innosent Jessimine, and an ambitious-in-loving woodbine;
ever climing to the top to showe his loved service, aspired to showe itt
self most aparante, spreading in kissing the fruict. And as affectionate to
thos kisses, amourously twining and imbracing, the branches which ther
had like twining and yeelding, gentle sprigs inibraced and lovingly
Joined in beeing twinn-like twines, and as sweetly inclosing them as
amourousest thoughts doth the harts of most amourous lovers. . . . This
made me thinke and remember the time when I had binn a lover” (11, I 2 3 ) .
The conjunction of water and “amorous” plants-the attributes of a
conventional locus amoenus--ofien characterizesWroth’s settings for laments.
As a symbol of temptation, the bower is reminiscent of the entrance to
Spenser’s Bower of Bliss, adorned with vines of “wanton wreathings
intricate” (II.xii.~3).’~
But Philarchos has no intention of maintaining a
Guyon-like resistance, and he glories in the court’s seductive atmos-
phere and the delights that “sincke into his sence,” in Spenser’s terms
(II.xii.54). His memories of past love evoke a present desire of “liberty”
and a wish for “variety” “instead of teadiousnes to one course” (11, I 2 3 ) .
Fleeing the household, Philarchos finds its supposed antithesis in yet
another domestic scene. One scene represents feminized doniesticity as
a dulling form of repression; the other, as a blissful idyll.
Wroth leads her readers slowly into amused recognition of the con-
tradictoriness and futility of Philarchos’ desire for “liberty.” In a state of
heightened amorous awareness Philarchos walks into a bedchamber
where a woman happens to be passionately lamenting her love for him.
28. Lady Mary Wroth, The Srrrind Part I$ Thr Ccxuttess t?fMon@inery’s Uraiiia, ed. Josephine
Roberts, Suzanne Gossett, and Jane1 Mueller (Tempe, Ark., I C ) C )p. ~ )I, 17. Subsequent references
are to volume and page numbers.
2 0 . Paniphdia’s favorite bower is such a place, where “the tops of trees joyning so close, 3s if
in love with each other, could not but affectionatly embrace” (I, yr). ?he Faenr Quecne, ed. Thomas
P. Roche, Jr. (London, 1987).
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Mary Trull 47 1
The sight arouses conflicting emotions: fear that “[he] might heere be
wrought to the full height of libertie,” and delight in his marvelous luck.
Wroth’s interest in the eavesdropper’s internal state contrasts with
Montemayor and Sidney, who display the female lamenter as an object
of voyeuristic pleasure. They invite the reader to participate in the scene
through the voyeur’s eyes, an illusion that Sidney breaks only by a brief
impulse to ridicule. Wroth, however, introduces a new distance between
reader and voyeur. Philarchos’ eavesdroppingscene replaces the spectacle
of female display with a critique, at multiple levels, of the male voyeur’s
pleasure. Philarchos tells this tale at his own expense; he describes his
sensations with some self-mockery, emphasizing contradictory emotions
and his ingenuity in justifying inconstancy. His female audience, more-
over, interrupts him with ironic and critical comments: Veralinda is
amused that Philarchos seems a “dreadful man” to the surprised lady,
while Pamphilia sardonically undercuts his assertions about the lady’s
motives. Wroth fully exploits the scene’s erotic potential while also
exposing the logic of that eroticism and the pretenses upon which it
depends.
Thus the scene confronts the eroticization of poetry in the overheard
laments of Wroth’s predecessors. The themes of modesty and desire
animating that eroticism are evident in the description of the bower that
climaxes the court’s seductive effect on Philarchos. The flowers represent
love through opposing metaphors: on the one hand, self-advancement;
on the other, modesty. The “ambitious-in-loving” woodbine, which
“aspired” to “show itself most apparent,” twines with the “blushing rose
and innosentJessamine”: the modest flowers yield, the ambitious embrace.
Such a play between desire and modesty characterizes Philarchos’
dalliance with the lady: “I tooke many most sweet and pleasing kisses
from her, which she, loath to lett me have, made them farr the sweeter,
striving soe pretily as the more pleasingly to make mee take more that
she might have more cause to refuse” (11, 126). The lady’s feigned resist-
ance heightens the enjoyment of both partners, and Philarchos pretends
not to see through her deception in order to preserve the transgressive
nature of their caresses. This delight in resistance extends to the potential
for violence, “I throwing myself on the bed, then holding her by the
trembling hand, her voice then weake with feare of furder danger” (11,
I 27). Here Philarchos implies that the lady’s fear is unfeigned, but he has
provided ample grounds for skepticism by portraying her modesty as a
highly effective seductive ploy.
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This scene’s delightful transgression is marred for Philarchos by his
consciousness that it is artificial. Upon first overhearing, he was troubled
by no such compunctions, and even while observing with pleasure the
lady’s repression of her passion, he seems to have encountered the
perfect “liberty” he desired: “I had all paines taken away, all traveiles
prevented; a most rich and intising place, and a lady soe delitious” (11, 125).
But as revealed in his threatening pose above, Philarchos enjoys the
exercise of his will and seems to find an utter lack of “paines” and
“traveiles” somewhat troubling. He repeatedly asks himself whether “I
had better pleased the sweet, sad soule with kinde and loving imbracings
then as I did [by restraint]” (11, 126). Philarchos’ enjoyment ceases when
he convinces the lady to tell her story. Words of love addressed directly
to him leave him cold, and he accuses her of insincerity: “onely words
will prove your troubles, nott infelt sorrow, since deepest and most true-
felt griefe is manifested in deepest and consealingest silence” (11, 128).
Philarchos follows this rebuke with a tirade on the purity ofmamage vows,
and sends his “lady soe delitious” home to her father. This tonal shift divests
his harangue of moral authority and suggests that the lady has ruined his
pleasure by depriving him of the role of voyeur. Wroth offers her readers
ample evidence that Philarchos’ outrage is hypocritical, and the narrative’s
multiple layers of calculation deny both the lovestruck lamenter and
Philarchos any claim to sincerity. In the context of her predecessors’ use of
overheard laments to support poetry’s claims to authentic expressiveness
and seductive power, Wroth’s puncturing of illusion amounts to an
implicit satire on such conventions. She provides an understated critique
of the erotics of authorship such scenes construct, including the analogy
between the woman’s body and words, the theme of poetry’s affective
power, and its location in privileged spaces of aristocratic privacy.
IV
Wroth turns the scene from authentic feelings to conflicted ones, from
poetic seduction to “home-bred matters”: marriage versus “liberty.” Her
exploration of fetishized privacy confronts the reader with Philarchos’
marital duty and his wish to evade it, while mocking the self-delusion
necessary for him to indulge his desires. Her scene’s import lies in the
experience of marriage as a restriction on “liberty,” and the conflicting
desires of a husband who is also, anomalously, a knight errant. In fact,
every husband happily married at the close of Uranio’s First Port is tempted
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Mary Trull 473
by “liberty” in the beginning of the Second Part, with the exception of
Parselius, who has already surrendered to inconstancy. In Urania the private
spaces of female lamentersnot only suggest pleasure and eroticism; they reflect
on the marital households that attempt-and often fail-to enclose them.
Although Philarchos’ temptation is the most self-reflective of such
episodes in Uvunia, Wroth often incorporates overheard laments into
inset narratives, leading to a great expansion of the themes we have already
encountered. As this episode places the private space oflament and illicit
love in uncomfortable opposition to the public and rather drab space of
marriage, Wroth’s more straightforward uses of the overheard lament
repeatedly highlight women’s private and public roles and desires. The
pleasurable space of the overheard lament is much like the motif of the
bower in Spenser, as Patricia Parker has described it. Spenser’s bowers
represent potentially dangerous indolence, but can also suggest a nurturing
retreat for the self from society and activity.”]Likewise, the natural beauty
of the loca amoena in which Wroth’s laments occur has a defensive edge,
indicating a temporary respite from the scrutiny of the marital household.
Typically in Urania, questing knights encounter a beautiful lady
lamenting lost love in a delightful natural setting. Amphilanthus and
Ollorandus ride by a “faire and pleasant rivers side” where willows grow
in the familiar amorously twining pattern: “the water in love with their
rootes, chastly embraced them, making pretty fine ponds betweene each
other, the armes, and bodyes of the trees, lying so kindly to each other”
(I, 288). O n a “kind of bed” of these boughs, the Lady Angler reclines
“as if fishing, but her mind plac’d on a higher pleasure . . . as she sate, she
would make pretty, and neate comparisons, betweene her betraying the
poore sily fish, and her owne being betrayed by the craft oflove” (I, 288).
Her exemplification of the type of the lamenting lady extends to the play
on clothing and nakedness, for her gown and sleeves are “buttoned to
the bottom. . . but by reason the weather was warme, they were left
open in spaces, through which her cut-worke Smock appeared, and here
and there, her delicate skin was seene” (I, 289).
Although in its eroticizing of compromised modesty this episode at
first appears conventional, the Lady Angler is no Belisa or Pyroclea, and
isn’t consumed by blushes when her love complaint is overheard. Her
song is a plea-even a demand-for exposure:
30. Patricia A. Parker, lmscapahle Romance: Studies in the Puetics 0fa Mode (Princeton, 1979),
pp. 101-13.
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Love peruse me, seeke, and finde
How each corner of niy minde
is a twine
woven to shine.
She asks that her “Deare” “desect me, sinewes,vaines . . . / When you thus
anotamise / AU my body, my heart prise” (I, 288-89). When Amphilanthus
and Ollorandus accompany the Lady Angler to her husband’s home,
they observe her pursuing a love affair in full view of admiring onlookers.
Here the locus umoenus stages the female poet’s desire to reveal herself,
rather than displaying her modesty; meanwhile, the household which is
imagmed elsewhere as so restrictive appears as a haven for idealized
extramarital love. The Lady Angler’s freedom does not result from a lack
ofsurveillance; since she is “much honoured, and beloved of all,” she has
drawn many knights to her husband’s castle, who are witnesses to the lovers’
bliss, for “never did any woman make such free, yet modest shew of love
as she d d ” (I, 295). The Lady Angler and her lover, Laurimello, display their
affection through amorous glances and signs of favor, “affection discovered
at the height, and as true love would wish, freely gven and taken” (I, 295).
Since with every glance their affection is “discovered,” the lovers’ intimacy
constitutes a private space that the audience in her husband’s household
repeatedly transgresses. Nevertheless, because the discovery of love is con-
tinually repeated, their tie retains the eroticism of privacy as well as the
liberty to eschew secrecy. The Lady Angler has redefined the space of the
household: in spite of her husband’s constant presence, it is a stage upon
which she acts out virtuous passion for an amazed audience. Bystanders
applaud her liaison, while Amphilanthus wonders whether he too may
“live to see such good” with Pamphha (I, 295). Over time, the Lady Angler
narrates, her husband has come to believe that her openness indicates
chastity. Here public visibility represents freedom from a husband’s donin-
ion, even though the affair takes place right under her husband’s nose.
As the Lady Angler’s lament rejected eroticized privacy in favor of tri-
umphant publicity, later lamenters seek supportive audiences for their
illicit love affairs; but such positive public contexts are transitory. Most
often, the private space of lament indicates exile, and Wroth’s lamenters
are driven by public humiliation to seek isolated place^.^' The locus
3 I . Similarly, Gary Waller argues that Wroth’s heroines’ search for private spaces to produce
verse laments indicates Wroth’s o w n weariness with the constant surveillance characteristic o f t h e
household (Sidncy Farnily Rornann, pp. 277-7‘)).
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M a y Trull 47s
umoenus of earlier laments takes on new forms, as a private refuge or a
place of exile. Pastora, for example, seeks a respite from punishing expo-
sure on a literal island, a “Rocke” in the sea that underscores the privacy
of her lament.” The pleasure with which Wroth describes Pastora’s
self-sufficiency makes ofher a kind of early Crusoe figure: she has a small
leaden-roofed house from which she views the sea, accompanied by two
maids and a herd of goats which serve as audience to her love complaints.
When Steriamus discovers this beautiful shepherdess on her rock, we
seem to have encountered merely a new variation on the locus amoenus.
However, the full significance of Pastora’s little island becomes clearer
when she describes her past. Like the Lady Angler, Pastora was unhap-
pily married and carried out an extramarital affair before a sympathetic
public: “Their loue (for what loue can be kept secret where such barres
bee for enioying) was seene and spoken of by many, yet few blam’d
them, but wish’d they were free” (I, 4 1 6 ) . ~When
~ her lover abandons
and scorns her, public attention becomes the keynote of her torment:
“What could be lost she parted from, content, quiet, honor, rest, repu-
tation, fortunes to succeed.” While Wroth begins the tale with Pastora’s
publicly admired liaison, exposure becomes tragic when, now named
Silvarina, she loses the struggle against detractors. The Pastora/Silvarina
plot enacts the failure of visions of idyllic exposure; Wroth cannot sus-
tain happy extramarital narratives for long, and as Urunia proceeds, illicit
love comes to connote furtiveness or even exclusion from the household
and disgrace.
Pastora/Silvarina thus vows to live and die on “the Rocke as hard as
her fortune, and as white as her faith” (I, 421). The change from magical
bower to rock reflects Wroth’s developing concern with the harsh con-
sequences of illicit love rather than its romantic idealization. As a setting
for private lament, the lush locus umoenus, in which the very trees seem to
3 2 . Steriamus’ sighting of Pastora combing her hair upon a rock evokes the mermaids who
were supposed to seduce sailors fatally. Ironically, as a reader for English Literary Remissonce has
pointed out to me, Pastora’s song signifies her self-sufficiency rather than a predatory sexuality, and
her image is designed to prompt admiring sympathy rather than lust. For an intriguing view of
Pastora’s significance for Wroth’s use of pastoral, see Amelia Zurcher Sandy, “Pastoral, Temper-
ancc, and the Unitary Selfin Wroth’s Uronia,” Studies in English Literature 42 ( 2 0 0 2 ) . 103-19.
3 3 , T h e lovers met at the house of her great friend, Silvarina, a woman involved in her own
extramarital liaison with her cousin. The two heroines become indistinguishable: Pastora IS the
lamenting lover whom Steriainus meets, but the island is bestowed on Silvarina. As Pastora and
Sllvarina merge, so do the fates of all Wroth’s wives, into one narrative o f social exposure and
exile from the household.
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make love, is replaced by a version of “hard pastoral,” a barren rock that
Pastora/Silvarina has made into a private retreat. Even though it is
pastoral, the rock is not a magical-romantic space opposed to the tedium
of marriage and household, but a fantasy household much less public
than those Wroth and her aristocratic characters knew. The fact that she
imagnes a place where privacy is possible in such hyperbolic terms-as
a rock in the midst of the sea-suggests that existence in the “normal”
household is characterized by relentless visibility.3J
Although lamenters appear to seek refuge in privacy, the lament in-
evitably brings an audience. Pastora sits atop her rock like a mermaid, and
a glimpse of her combing her hair and singing draws Steriamus across the
sea to note that her beauty is “fit to be beloved and pittied, that it was no
more cherished” (I, 415 ) . Contradictorily, the refugee fleeing exposure
deserves, and gains, a pitying audience. Wroth’s representation of such
attention can be highly conflicted, as in her depiction of Dorolina, a
“wretched forlorne soul” whose lament makes her into a symbol of grief:
“she one while cryed, another chafed, smil’d, scratch’d her head, stamp’d,
rail’d, and all at Love” (I, 490). Dorolina haunts a delightful lovers’
grove, but in her excessive displays of feeling, she becomes the sort of
fountain one might find in a locus amoenus: she “seem’d like a mooving,
or stirring water-worke: she turn’d to them, and from them againe, shee
cryd, and groan’d, then scornfully seem’d to defie passion, and with a
faint forged countenance would have appeared sociable” (I, 491).By so
vigorously inhabiting the role oflamenter, Dorolina becomes part of the
frame rather than a subject; she is a device depicting love as much as a
lover.35Wroth reduces the private space of lament to a public sign indi-
cating love, which draws as an audience of lovers who have known similar
losses and who draw out Dorolina’s tale with eager sympathy.
As we have seen, Wroth’s overheard laments move beyond the theme
of privacy’s violation to depict “private” realms in which positive expos-
ure is possible. The space of private lament can encompass crowds, yet
still retain the signifiers of removal and refuge. The shared privacy of
such a space consists in its liberty from conventional laws regulating
34. O n the pervasive analogies between topography and affect in Urania, see Cavanagh.
35. Ann Rosalind Jones finds the same logic of spectacle in Pamphitia 10 Amphilanthus, the
sonnet sequence closing Urania: “This claim to the status of martyr positions Paniphilia as public
sign, pointing to the cruelty ofher oppressors. The woman calls upon the gaze ofa public to make
a case for her innocence and merit, and she invokes a tragic setting to reinforce that innocence
through direct, even aggressive control of audience perspective” (p. I so).
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Mary Tmll 477
feminine modesty and shame. While walking alone in a pleasant copse,
the young princess Perselina happens on a “delicate, but distressed crea-
ture, in habits of a Pilgrime,” lamenting in verse her long “Pilgnmage for
Love” and expecting to “travel1 till I die.” Perselina invites her into a
“thicke,” and the two women walk apart from their servants into “the
thickest part, as close as their sufferings were to themselves,” where the
pilgrim Pelarina resists revealing “that secret, which must be known”
(I, 5 2 8 ) . At first Pelarina’s resistance appears to replicate the fetishized
modesty of conventional female lamenters; but her protests against self-
revelation are speedily undercut by Perselina, who remarks that she has
already deduced Pelarina’s story from her “excellent speech, and man-
ner.” Perselina is also a lover, and the parallels between the two women’s
names and probable fates reinforce the sense of intimacy provided by
their mutual retreat. Like previous lamenters, Pelarina lived to regret the
glory she once took in public acknowledgement of her love when she
“discern’d my losse publikely noted” (I, 5 3 2 ) . T o Perselina, however,
she can admit that she had sex with her lover: “I granted what I may
lawfully repent . . . he but asked, and I yeelded, yet this I repent not”
(I, 533). The “thicke” in the forest creates a private space for shared suf-
fering, revaluing the role of the openly desiring woman.36
Nevertheless, the space of lament is only a temporary haven for
Wroth’s many exiled illicit lovers. The motif of the exiled lamenter
imitates the rhetoric of abandoned speakers such as Jane Shore and
Rosamond Clifford, ghosts denied both life and rest. Exile and exposure
are parallel means of portraying illicit love as a loss of secure social
position-one at first voluntary, as a woman seeks to evade spousal or
parental control, and then forced, as women suffer public judgment, lose
support networks, and are cast out of both privacy and the household at
once. The trope of honesty, the depiction of women’s abuse and exploita-
tion by powerful men, and the topic of social falls create a social realism
in abandoned women’s laments present in few other Renaissance literary
36. O n Wroth’s representation of intimacy among women, see Naomi J. Miller, who argues
that she creates a new genre of feminine romance. Jacqueline T. Miller argues that Wroth depicts
emotions’ origins in such intersubjective moments; authentic passion erupts through imitation of
another’s passion, blurring the border between self and other. See Jacqueline T. Miller, ”The
Passion Signified: Imitation and the Construction of Emotions in Sidney and Wroth,” Criticism
43 (2001). 407-21;Naomi J. Miller, “Engendering Discourse: Women’s Voices in Wroth’s
Urania and Shakespeare’sPlays,” Readirig Mary Wroth, pp. 154-72, and Chanying the Subject: Mary
Wroth and Fipuations of Gender in Early Modern Enyland (Lexington, Ken., 1996).

forms. Laments present the common problems ofwomen as the result, not
of individual guilt, but of unjust institutions-concubinage and arranged
marriage. In this respect Wroth’s heroines mirror the Jane Shores and
Rosamonds of narrative verse.
IV
Wroth retains the magcal aura of privacy that infuses earlier overheard
laments; in her more romantic narratives wives create a haven from
household scrutiny through extramarital love. However, her representa-
tion of women in the household is extraordinarily complex and shifting;
in some tales illicit love is not private but highly visible, while in others
the erotic fascination of privacy is replaced by the tragic fate of social
exile. The constant theme is that of the harshness of household social
space: whether wives hide or are exposed in it, flee or are exiled from it,
the household is inhospitable and unaccommodating. Perhaps this
conclusion offers little surprise to those acquainted with the antifeminist
bent of early modern marriage advice manuals. We might expect Wroth
to show women estranged from the household or rejecting it; but we
also find husbands repelled by it. The households of Urania and the private
spaces of lament with which they are juxtaposed sketch out a perspectival
understanding of marriage. Each sex views the household as the other’s
realm, and each is in constant search of a private space that will fulfill the
desires the household promised, but failed, to satis@.
Remarkably, Wroth’s depiction of love and marriage in Urania both
idealizes adultery and realistically depicts her own period’s rigorous
social retribution against illicitly loving women. Wroth’s realism focuses
on negative social consequences of love and sexual consummation,
depicting women’s falls as products of institutional injustices rather than
providential or moral failures. In such moments she shows that personal
tragedy has systemic causes in the social order. Renaissance readers must
have been more accustomed to a different style in contemporary pastoral
romance, where fallible and often amusing lovers are saved froni their
worst missteps, finally marrying or leading safely escapist lives as
shepherds. Wroth redefines romance; her lovers are larger than life, like
the heroic adulterers of Arthurian legend, but they encounter realistic
fates.
Despite animadversions from all quarters against its supposedly low
moral and aesthetic standards, chivalric romance on the Arthurian model
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A4ut-y Trull 479
remained popular in England through the 1 6 3 0 ’ s . ~Amadis
~ of Gaul and
his brother Galaor, King Arthur, Lancelot, Tristan, CligZs, and many
other chivalric heroes enjoyed the occasional stolen hour of love-often
extramarital-with the ladies they rescued.38Generally, while Renais-
sance pastoral romance valorized the overcoming of sexual temptation,
earlier chivalric romance delighted in surmounting obstacles to sexual
congress such as husbands and fathers. Writers of pastoral romance
generally limited love plots to more escapist themes and resolutions.
Although pastoral heroines are abandoned or star-crossed lovers, con-
siderations of sexual experience, illicit love, and social consequences do
not enter into heroines’ love affairs in Sannazaro, Montemayor, Polo, or
d’Urf6. In keeping with his interest in the much more explicit Amadis of
Gaul ( I S O ~ ) ,Sidney has Musidoms attempt to rape Pamela, whde Pyrocles’
eavesdropping on Philoclea ends in “due bliss” in bed. However, these
sexual scenes were excised in the composite editions of I 593 and later; in
any case, they close the courtship stage of anticipation and uncertainty
during which Sidney’s lovers produce their poetic complaints. Although
the many lovers’ laments in these pastoral romances address a variety of
catastrophes-changes of affection, parental opposition, death, difference
in status, and misunderstandings-they avoid directly representing con-
summation and its consequences.
Likewise, marriage poses a significant difficulty for pastoral romance.
The plot of Montemayor’s Dium is predicated on the shepherdess
Diana’s marriage to the brutish Delius, which drives her lover Syrenus to
despair. Diana is our heroine, the marriage was forced, and Syrenus is
obviously superior to Delius, so the reader must wonder whether Diana
and Syrenus will form an extramarital liaison. Adding to the suspense,
37. O n the popularity of chivalric romance, as well as its critical reception, see R. S . Crane,
The Vogue qfMedieva1 Chivalric Romance During the English Renaissance (Menasha, Wisc, 1919). For
more recent studies, see Anne Falke, “‘The Work Well Done that Pleaseth All’: Emanuel Forde
an the Seventeenth-Century Popular Romance,” Studies in Philology 78 (1981).241-54; and
Lorna Hutson, “Chivalry for Merchants, Or, Knights of Temperance in the Realms of Gold,”
Jourrzal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 26 (1996), 29-59.
3 8 . Critic5 have pointed out, however, that the Amadis romances show greater interest in
constancy in love and near-marriages than do medieval Arthurian romances. See Marian Rothstein,
“Clandestine Marriage and Amadis de Gaulr: The Text, the World, and the Reader,” Sirteenth-
Centuryjoumal 25 (1994),873-86; and Harry Sieber, “The Romance of Chivalry in Spain: From
Kodriguez de Montalvo to Cervantes,” in Roniance: Generic ‘Zizlnsfornlationfromtiationfrom Chritien de Troyes
to Cervantes, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee (Hanover, N.H., 1985), pp. 203-
19.
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Montemayor eventually disposes of Delius in a freak accident, freeing
Diana to marry. All the while, the prospect of extramarital love is
implicit, as Diana and Syrenus wander the countryside lamenting their
lost happiness; but they remain separate at the end of Diana Enamoured.
Neither Montemayor nor Polo seems to be able to resolve Diana’s plot
satisfactorily;the other lovers’ sagas end with marriage, but her previous
union seems to have condemned her to celibacy. Perhaps a widow’s
marriage among those of maids and nymphs would have seemed
anomalous-the stuff of comedy and not romance.
Sidney does represent marriage and extramarital love in the love quad-
rangle that requires both Philoclea’s mother and father to fall in love
with Pyrocles-as-Cleophila. As in Diana, the husband’s extramarital
attraction is merely ridiculous, and Basilius’ hopeless courtship of the
Amazon, like Delius’ idiotic pursuit of Alcida, occasions no serious
reflections on the subject of fidelity. Sidney also makes the passionate
queen, Gynecia, the object of satire; but she is altogether a more com-
plex and intelligent character than her husband, and fully recognizes the
moral quandary in her attraction to Pyrocles. In repeatedly unsuccessful
attempts to overcome shame, Gynecia devises strategies of self-justification
that are both amusing and sympathetic. Sidney depicts her attempts on
Pyrocles as one-sided battles between virtue and undeniable, all-mastering
desire.3YBut Gynecia is saved from desire’s consequences by her hus-
band’s death, for when he miraculously revives, she has experienced a
change of heart. This typically romantic resolution allows Sidney to
maintain a delicate balance between satire and escapism.
Mary Wroth’s insistence on constancy in love as the ultimate virtue
has its Neoplatonic overtones, and like Sidney, she generally avoids
asserting outright that her heroines consummate their lifelong passions
outside of marriage. But Wroth’s idealization of adulterous love reflects
the fascination exerted by lovers such as Lancelot and Guenevere, and
Tristan and Isolde. Her lovers face many of the obstacles that Arthurian
knights and ladies encountered: like Tristan, Aniphilanthus continually
neglects his beloved to woo or marry other women, and like Tristan,
Lancelot, and Yvain, he succumbs to madness when his attempts to reu-
nite with his beloved are frustrated. Many wives in U~aniamust bear the
attention of vain, cowardly husbands such as Isolde’s King Mark, whom
39. See, 2.g.. Old Arcadia. ed. Robertson, pp. 48, 91-93, and 122-23.
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Mary Trull 48 1
Tristan regularly humiliates in Sir Thomas Malory. For Isolde, as for
many of Wroth’s wives, a degrading marriage to an unworthy man
throws illicit love into heroic relief: Malory has Isolde send to Guenevere
the triumphant message that “ther be withyn this land but four lovers,
that is Sire Lancelot du Lake and Quene Guenever, and Sire Trystram de
Lyonas and Quene Isoud.”’” In Wroth, as in chivalric romance, love is
more elevated, more heroic, when it is barred by marriage ties.
The literary tradition of the duped husband underlies the triangle of
Tristan, Isolde, and King Mark, and informs many of Wroth’s comical
depictions of unworthy husbands. But for Wroth, the love triangle pro-
vides an opportunity to reflect on wives’ experiences of marriage in a way
far more complex than was possible in earlier romances. We have seen
that Wroth’s overheard laments often inscribe a private space that may
be a refuge from marriage or the household. In Urania’s first book she
similarly represents illicit love affairs theniselves as “private spaces”
within the hostile household in which the wife finds herself a stranger.
The male lover represents escape from husbandly domination; his exist-
ence creates a figurative private space “owned” by the wife within or
without a household from which she is alienated. Such a female propri-
etary space modifies the early modern motif of a wife as a jewel safe in
her husband’s keeping by depicting the husband as unworthy and his
domain as dystopic; the separate realm of illicit love provides a more
appropriate setting for the virtuous woman.4’However, such private spaces
are contingent and highly unstable, either doomed by the logc of house-
hold supervision, or by the social victimization of female adulterers.
Uruniu’s first lamenting lover, Perissus, describes his beloved Limena’s
marriage to Philargus as “her Delicacy kept like a Diamond in a rotten
box” (I, 8). Philargus’ torture of Limena draws upon the spectacular
image of female imprisonment in Spenser’s House of Busirane (Faerie
Queene III.xi); but Wroth explicitly applies the notion ofa house ofmale
40. Caxton’s Malory, ed. Spisak, Book 8, p. 230,ll. 37-39.

41. Wroth’s depictions of adulterous privacy contrast with the representatlon of rape as an
invasion of a woman’s bedchamber in works such as The Rape of Lucrere and Cymbeline. See
Georgianna Ziegler, ’‘My Lady’s Chamber: Female Space, Female Chastity in Shakespeare,” Textual
Practice 4 (1990). 73-90. O n Wroth‘s use ofarchitectural space to figure the self, see Shannon Miller,
“Constructing the Female Self: Architectural Structures in Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Renaissance
Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia, I()()()), pp. 139-
$9. O n domestic spaces and female homosociality, see Laurie J. Shannon, “Emilia’s Argument:
Friendship and ‘Human Title’ in T h e Two Noole Kinstnett,” ELH 64 (1997), 657-82.
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torment to marriage.’2 Philargus first imposes his will on Limena through
his lordship of the household; he manufactures excuses to dismiss her
servants and place his own in her service. The house is also a metaphor
for marriage’s restrictions; “Limena” stands on the threshold between
her husband’s control and the temporary freedom represented by extra-
marital love. The presence of her lover Perissus shows “that Philargus[’s]
house is not in all places” (I, 10).
In two early stories-about the illicit lovers of Cephalonia, and
Ollorandus and Melasinda-wives and their lovers meet in a locus umoe-
N U S that reflects and intensifies the pleasurable secrecy of their liaison.
Like the private spaces of women’s laments, the delight of these illicit
spaces highlights the scrutiny and tyranny that Wroth’s characters experi-
. ~ ~ lovers of Cephalonia escape
ence in the marital h o ~ s e h o l d The
during the unwilling bride’s wedding feast and are “laid within a delicate
Vineyard, a place able to hide them, and plese them with as much
content, as Paris felt, when hee had deceiv’d the Greeke King of his
beautifull Helen” (I, 42). Ollorandus and Melasinda’s tale offers a surprising
vision of adultery that enhances the Paris-figure’s audacity. Ollorandus
persuades Melasinda to wed another man for political reasons: “With
much adoe, and long perswasions I wonne (her love to mee) her yielding
for the other,” he relates, even leading her to the bridal chamber. The
next morning “shee came downe into a little Garden, whereinto no
window looked, but that in her Cabinet, nor key could open but her
owne. . . . Thus was I the blest man, injoying the world of riches in her
love, and hee contented after, having what he sought” (I, 80). More
privileged than Paris, Ollorandus plays both the sponsor of the marriage
and its gloating violator. The garden, a locus arnoentrs in the middle of
the house which can only be reached or viewed through the lady’s
private chamber, denionstrates that the husband’s “house is not in all
42. See Helen Hackett, “The Torture of Liniena: Sex and Violence in Lady Mary Wroth’s
Ilranin,” in L‘uififX Wonten: Cmderatrd Sexuality in Early Modern W r i t i q , ed. Kate Chedgzoy et al.
(Pittsburgh, 19g7), pp. 93-110; Jacqueline T. Miller, “Lady Mary Wroth in the House of
Busirane,” in Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations iri the Early Modern A p , ed. Patrick Cheney and
Lauren Silbernian (Lexington, Ken., zooo), pp. I I 5-24; and Shannon Miller, “‘Mirrours More
Then One’: Edtnund Spenser and Female Authority in the Seventeenth Century,” in Cheney
and Silbernian, pp. 125-47.
43. O n the lorirs amcienris as erotic setting in Amadis of Card and Don Quixore, see Alfred
Rodriguez and Joel F. Dykstra, “Cervantes’s Parodic Rendering of a Traditional Topos: Lorn
Antoenus,” Cmantcs: Bulletin oJthe Cervantes Society CfAmcrica 17 (1997), I I 3-21.
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Mary TrdE 483
places.’’44But in this story the extent to which the wife has established
her own foothold is unclear: has the affair chiseled out a space for her-
or ceded it from her husband to her lover?
The troubles Wroth and other women endured under her class’s mar-
riage system are magcally elided in these early episodes by faithful illicit
love, which results at worst in a laudable martyrdom, and at best in even-
tual marriage for love. In these tales Wroth’s translation of experience
gives to a fate laden with shame in fallen women’s laments all the
virtuous heroism available in both pastoral and chivalric romance. Her
heroines’ unhappiness with arranged marriages, their abandonment by
lovers, and their superhuman constancy create heroic narratives out of
the unfortunate conditions of Wroth’s life. But marvelous and surprising
contexts (the bride’s escape from her wedding feast, Ollorandus’ arrange-
ment of his lover’s marriage, Philargus’ extreme villainy, and Limena’s
eleventh-hour escape from death) are not the only mode in which
Wroth addresses illicit love. Such striking examples dominate the first
two books of the First Part and provide analogues for Pamphilia and
Amphilanthus’ liaison in the Second Part; however, they are anomalous
in the context of Urunia as a whole. When Wroth turns to wives as nar-
rators in Books I11 and IV, she no longer represents extramarital love as
a secret escape from the household.
Wroth’s later female narrators construct a new kind of heroism not by
escaping the household, but by maneuvering within it. The Lady
Angler’s story idealizes the pursuit ofillicit love on the model ofLancelot
and Guenevere or Tristan and Isolde, but as one of Wroth’s tales “more
exactly related then a fixion,” it also depicts realistic social obstacles to
women’s desires.45As a female poet, the Lady Angler is linked to Wroth;
like her, she loves her cousin and has intimate friendships with his
sister and mother, but marries another man before she and her cousin
acknowledge their mutual love. No knight errant will arrive to save her
from her husband, who himself is no villain, merely unworthy: “as if hee
were made for a punishment to her, for being so excellently perfect
above the common rate of her sex” (I, 290). With this husband the Lady
44. Chivalric romance features such hidden lovers as well: in the Morte D’Arthur, Tristan
brings his beloved Isolde home to marry King Mark and is later established as her lover in a secret
turret in the castle. Chrktien de Troyes’ Cligss also creates a domestic love nest under hi5 mistress’
husband’s nose in a castle camouflaged by quasi-magical craft.
45. So Dorolina responds when Pamphilia tells the “French Story” of Lindamira’s betrayal
(1. 5 0 5 ) .
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Angler leads a calm life, growing to be “good friends, and like kind
mates” (I, 295). Her autobiography derives its action from her early
schemes to avoid marriage and encourage her cousin Laurimello to pro-
pose, all without openly declaring herself. Modesty silences her desire,
for she knows Laurimello “hated a forward woman” (I, 294). Having
“no meanes, save mine owne industrie, and strenth of mind,” the lady
must overcome marital pressures by oblique means, “busied like a Spider,
which being to crosse from one beame to another, must worke by waies,
and goe farre about, making more webs to catch her selfe into her owne
purpose, then if she were to goe an ordinary straight course” (I, 293).
The heroism of the tale is all the lady’s, but it consists in cunning nianip-
ulation rather than romantic suffering: she urges her father to decline one
suitor based on a fictional obligation to an earlier suitor, and fakes a
proxy courtship to facilitate meetings with Laurimello.
Wroth never abandons entirely the vision of idyllic illicit love that
she presents in Ollorandus and Melisinda, Perissus and Limena, the
Cephalonian lovers, and the Lady Angler and Laurimello. The work
culminates with the union of Zlvuniu’s central heroine Pamphilia, and her
inconstant lover Aniphilanthus, but only after each marries another.
Leutissia points o u t to Pamphilia that her adoring husband’s blind
obedience provides the perfect setting “co[nte]ntedly and chastely to
beeholde your deerest, safely and gloriously” (11, 378); accordingly,
Amphilanthus and Pamphilia delight in each other’s company under the
approving eye of his sister Urania. In the context of the many social falls
Wroth depicts, the ability to love illicitly both “safely and gloriously”
seems to be a property of Pamphilia’s exceptionalism: she is a marvel of
constancy and excels Uruniu’s other women in both virtue and rank, for
she is a queen in her own right. But even in Paniphilia’s case, Wroth
does not quite accept such a story, and she does not depict the role of
Rodomandro, Pamphilia’s husband, consistently. Although Wroth has
introduced him as a model ofwisdom, valor, and chivalry, afier marriage
Kodomandro becomes a repulsive wittold: when Pamphilia’s brother dies
he seeks to “Hold her in his arms, and buss her, and call her his deer ducke,
and intreat her to bear her brothers loss patiently for his sake, yett if ther
had nott binn a better comforter, I doubt itt would of nessessitie have
binn wurse with Pamphilia” (11, 403). Upon learning that Pamphilia
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Mary Trull 485
has become a widow, we may well conclude that Wroth has no inten-
tion of maintaining this lopsided love triangle; but her husband, the “great
Chamm,” reappears on the next page alive and traveling with the lovers
in a cheerful threesome (11, 406-07). This unrevised trace of Wroth’s
authorial quandary records a familiar ambivalence about the fantasy of
idyllic, illicit love. The possibility of merging the social restrictions of
marriage with the satisfaction of unruly personal desire is unthought
of in abandoned women’s laments; Wroth takes the leap of thinking it,
but she cannot forget the real consequences of social transgressions.
Wroth is concerned to record the existence of happy marriages in
Uruniu, if not to linger on their depiction, and she satirizes women who
despise marriage, desire power over men, or are sexually voracious.
Happy marriages create little plot development in a romance, but Wroth
does assert that Urania and Steriamus, and Parselius and Dalinea lead
satisfactory lives.46Parselius and Dalinea’s marriage receives the fullest
treatment, and Wroth accords them a mutuality of desire that creates an
ideal union: “If she had a mind to goe abroad, he could never know
cause to stay him from accompaning her; if hee liked any sport, or pleas-
ure abroad that she chose to please her selfe withall, his desire was her
will, and her will desire to serve him” (I, 519).An instrumental view of
marriage, however, marks a woman as a villain. There is plenty of con-
tempt for marriage in Uruniu, but it is voiced by less virtuous women
than Urania and Dalinea. “Fancy” comically debases marriage as “ties
att home, bawling of bratts, monthes keeping-in, houswyfery, and
daries, and a pudder of all home-made troubles” (11, 3 8). There are also
“devouring throats,” voraciously sexual women who provide foils for
Wroth’s virtuous illicit lovers; these women, like the fay who seduces
Selarinus and the Queen of Candia, who seduces Amphilanthus, depre-
cate marital love and abandon the men they have sexually exploited.
Wroth ridicules such proud and wanton women, often depicting them
as household tyrants who imprison men out of lust or sadism. Such are
the Lady of Sio; the Princess of Rhodes, who puts her lover in a cage;
Olixia, the Lady of the Forrest Gulf; and the aptly named Lycencia. All
of these except the Lady of Sio are heads of their households; their
aggressive sexuality and physical dominion over men constitute a
46. In one case Wroth’s description o f happy marriage is so hyperbolic as to seem defensive:
she writes that Parismeria and his beloved live “in the rarest parfectiones of their constan[cie] and
with out any instant ofbeeing neer the feeling of any kinde of a little clowde of the thing mistak-
ing” (11, 317).

nightmare version of wifeliness. Their power far exceeds the hard-won
footholds established by marriage’s martyrs, such as Lisia and the Lady
Angler. Objects of Wroth’s ridicule and scorn, they represent a night-
marishly excessive parody of her own vision of wifely power and erotic
gratification in the household.
Wroth’s powerful but repellent women suggest that if the marital
household presents a forbidding aspect to wives, inen also have soine-
thing to fear from its enclosure. Wroth does not dwell on the unhappy
husband as she does on the dissatisfied wife, but many illicit male lovers
are escaping their own stifling marriages. She gives one husband’s per-
spective on marriage in the story of Sirelius, which is told by his friend
Procatus. Sirelius married for love, but has escaped his discontented wife
to wander disguised as a shepherd. Wroth mocks pastoral escapism here:
Procatus is “tired with rural1 mirth, and passionate ditties, [he] had rather
heare a horse neigh, then all the Sheephardesses in this Island sing”
(I, 517). Sirelius’ retreat into male society, poetry, and rustic simplicity
implies that even marriages for love create a need for male escape. Wroth
repeats this pattern in the temptation of the husbands in the Second Purt
of Uvaniu: Selarinus, Philarchos, Steriamus, Leonius, and Rosindy-all
those heroes happily married in the First Puyt, except Parselius and Antissius-
are tempted to infidelity in a series of parallel episodes. Wroth portrays
these husbands as having aged and become unfamiliar with the business of
knight errancy during years of marriage; for each of them, the loss of the
infants presents a chance to recapture romantic masculinity through martial
endeavors, wandering, and male society. Rosindy, for example, “ha[d]
longe binn shutt up in idlenes (att least as hee thought), having gott out
by perswasions.” “Like a contented prisoner, to take somm refreshment
of his spiritts and exercise his wounted skill . . . in Chivallry,” he left his
beloved wife at home (11, 166).Wroth presents husbands’ experiences with
a light touch, not lambasting marriage, but suggesting that the “contented
prisoner” has, after all, little to occupy him at home. From the husband’s
perspective, the household is the wife’s domain and the sphere of niascu-
line action lies elsewhere; he, too, is not quite at home in the household.
Feats of arms being only one aspect of chivalry, each of the husbands
feels the pull of illicit love, and temptation often takes the form of a
domestic scene. I have discussed the first and most detailed such scene,
that of Philarchos, above; as we have seen, even before he enters his
admirer’s bedchamber, the sumptuous court setting has created a seduc-
tive aura and set his thoughts upon love. The others’ experiences are
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Mary Trull 487
similar: Selarinus is unfaithful to the memory of Philistella in a “most
pleasing garden” where two trees “sweetly embraced with soft and
loving Myrtle;” he falls in love while spying on a woman’s private
“chamber recreations” (11, 7). Like Philarchos, Steriamus is brought in
mind of his early days as a lover by a rich and beautiful castle designed to
replicate the Morean court, where he first began to love Pamphilia.
Remembering the begnnings of his love, Steriamus, “seeing the delicate
Groves resembling soe neere the others the sweet and most delectable
pastures and all soe like, as hee was allniost like to have falen into a
dangerous passion” (11, I 52). Melissea’s magic holds him back from such
a passion, but he finds Leonius victimized by a state reminiscent of
Spenser’s Bower of Bliss: he lies by a “most pleasing” fountain in the lap
of a sorceress-seductress, “she dandling him (as itt were) and playing with
his soft, delicate locks” (I, 161). In one respect the artfully mesmerizing
beauty of the Bower of Bliss represents its mistress’ power to seduce and
imprison men, robbing them of the desire to pursue the good; in Uruniu
as well, women’s power over men is often figured by a seductive setting
which may lure and entrap the ~usceptible.~’
For Wroth, however, the equation of woman and house is not
antifeminist dogma but a male perspective on women’s privacy that
reflects men’s own ambiguous relation to the households in which they
are lords and masters. For the most part, the few detailed interior scenes
depicting women in Uruniu are seen from the perspective of a man fall-
ing in love. Parselius is struck with love for Dalinea (breaking his vows
to Urania) when he beholds her at home in an exquisitely appointed
chamber, her ladies “a little distant from her in a faire compasse Win-
dow, where also stood a Chaire, wherein it seemed she had been sitting,
till the newes came of his arrivall. In that Chaire lay a Booke, the Ladies
were all at worke; so as it shewed, she read while they wrought. All this
Parselius beheld, but most the Princesse” (I, 124). This eroticized female
domestic scene-the empty chair and abandoned book reminiscent of
the lady’s “chamber recreations”-suggests the charged atmosphere of
feminine privacy in Dutch genre painting of the 1650’s to 1670’s.‘~
47. O n Wroth’s use of “Spenserian symbolic places,” see Lewalski, pp. 263-64.
48. See Richard Helgerson, “Soldiers and Enigmatic Girls,” in Adulterous Alliances: Home,
State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Paintin2 (Chicago, zooo), pp. 79-1 19. Mary
Ellen Lamb emphasizes in this scene the Figns of wealth which further eroticize Dalinea’s domes-
ticity in “Women Readers in Mary Wroth’s lirania,” in Miller and Waller, pp. 210-27.

Wroth’s truly loving men delight in the vision of their beloveds as
mistresses of households and domestic beings, as Amphilanthus does
when, at sail on the high seas, he recalls Pamphilia as an attribute of her
garden: “0sweet waulke, by her devine hands cutt out and made. I shall
never more see thee nor her, the deere mistress of thee” (11, 1 8 3 ) . Both
Parselius and Amphilanthus are wandering in search of adventure when
they encounter, or imagine, erotic visions of female domesticity; but
immersion in “home-bred matters” drives them back to more exotic and
masculine p u r ~ u i t s Wroth
. ~ ~ does not satirize this male view of female
domesticity-as she does, for example, Philarchos’ voyeurism-but her
presentation of wives’ relation to the household is, as we have seen, very
different from such idealizing views. Each sex views the household as the
other’s domain, and each is alienated from that domain: husbands,
because it is feminized, and wives, because men are masters there.”]
We can be fairly certain that in writing of husbands and wives Wroth
was sometimes reflecting on real relations she saw around her. Urunia
was received as a roman li clef, and complaints of scandal drove Wroth to
apologes and promises to withdraw the book. The episode of Sirelius
and Procatus was the subject of a direct accusation by Edward Denny,
who found himself reflected in the story of a near-homicidal father.5’
Sirelius’ pastoral escape from his present wife niay very well allude to an
actual desertion by James Hay which those familiar with aristocratic
gossip would easily recognize. Heroines such as Bellamira, Pamphilia,
and Lindamira, whose plots mirror Wroth’s life, suggest that the lives of
her peers may also have been reflected in Uruniu’s dozens of subplots.
The many husbands and wives of Urunia probably allegorize the marital
struggles Wroth saw around her, as well as those she experienced first-
hand. I t is much easier for present-day critics to recognize early modern
political allegory or topicality than domestic allegory; Urunia provides
an unusual opportunity to observe the relation between fiction and
49. Paul Salzinan argues that this contrast between romantic male pursuits and pastoral female
pursuits structures gender and genre in Urawia. See Salzman, “The Strang(E) Constructions of
Mary Wroth’s Urmia: Arcadian Romance and the Public Realm,” pp. 109-24.
50. Similarly, Lena Cowen Orliii finds that the household of marriage advice tracts is a
“contested space” due to its conflicting associations with each sex; while it is a “woman’s place,”
“a man’s house is his castle.” See Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culflrre in Post-Reformation Ety-
land (Ithaca, 19y4),pp. 102-03.
5 I . See Josephine A. Roberts, “Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania: A Response to Jacobean Censorship,”
NKUJ Ways nflooking at Old Texts, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, NY, 1993). pp. 125-29.
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Mary Trull 489
experience in the domestic realm. Wroth may have been driven to self-
representation in search of the same satisfactions her heroines gain from
public reception of their private gneE an audience’s sympathy and admira-
tion for their moral and rhetorical strength. But Wroth also lamented for
others, like Lord Denny’s daughter, and allowed her readers to pierce the
privacy of others’ suffering, thus precluding for herself the sympathetic
reception she envisioned for her heroines.
ST. OLAF C O L L E G E
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MARY T R U L L

“Philaps’ House Is Not in All Places”: Mam’age, Privacy,

n 1621 the bookstalls of London featured an unusual offering: T h e

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Louis Montrose has remarked of Spenser’s “episodes of interrupted inti-

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Wroth’s overheard laments break decisively with the traditions of

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40. Caxton’s Malory, ed. Spisak, Book 8, p. 230,ll. 37-39.

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