[In the following essay, Waller, a noted scholar on Jacobean playwright Mary Wroth, offers a detailed analysis of the gender politics in her work.]

As a woman in the Jacobean court, as a lady-in-waiting and occasional dancer, Mary Wroth played an appropriately decorative and silent part in the margins of the spectacle of the court; her primary role was simply to be seen, as a graceful, minor contributor to the dazzling visual display that mirrored for its participants the gloriousness that was a central part of the court's self-image. Like one of her characters in her prose romance, Urania, she ‘both saw those sports the Court affects, and are necessary follies for that place, as Masques and Dauncings, and was an Actor my selfe amongst them’ (Urania, p. 457). Her cousin William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke—who was her lover and fathered two children with her—was likewise a minor participant in the orchestrations of court display, but, as a man, ‘naturally’ he took on more active roles as a dancer, tilter, and challenger, and in his highly visible public roles as patron and political authority.

One of the roles that Pembroke did not play was that of playwright: of the two cousins, it was Wroth who actually wrote a play, even though it was never published and may not have been acted, even privately. So far as we know, too, she had no direct contact with the public theater, although Naomi Miller has argued that, especially in Urania, there are many signs of Wroth's interest in a concept of the dramatic and the theatrical very different from those derived from the masque and the specular theater of the court: many revelations occur in dramatic dialogues that echo the conversations between heroines and confidantes, like Beatrice and Hero, in Shakespeare's comedies. But what Margaret McLaren terms ‘the mechanics of seeming’ in Urania suggests that Wroth was aware that court theatricals displayed what must have been, especially for a woman, an all too familiar metaphor for the gender politics of the court. Several key episodes occur in ‘theaters,’ which are depicted not merely as sites of dramatic entertainment but of enchantment and self-discovery, as if one of the functions of artifice and role playing were to reveal the origins and destiny of the actors, not merely the roles they play.¹ When Pamphilia asserts that ‘an Actor knowes when to speake, when to sigh, when to end: a true feeler is wrapped in distempers, and only can know how to heare’ (Urania, p. 314), she may be displaying a disdain for feigned emotion, but the sorrowful queen and every other character in the romance are constantly on display, arranging scenes to display themselves as surely as the Jacobean courtiers in their elaborately staged performances, onstage and off. Pamphilia arrives at the House of Love in calculatedly spectacular fashion, in a ‘Chariot of Watchet, embroydred with Crimson silke, and purle of silver.’ Bacon pointed out that the ‘glories’ of tournaments are ‘chiefly in the Chariots, wherein the Challengers make their entry.’² When King Antisius of Romania arrives with his knights to take part in the Accession Day tournament - thus echoing the same event in the court of James - they are referred to, not without some extended irony, as actors (Urania, pp. 123, 341). In Urania there are a number of scenes in which the male propensity to self-display and self-advertising are satirized. The sly humor, directed even at the matchless Amphilanthus, is both consistent and serious: the pressures and contradictions of the court, whereby men had to constantly struggle for recognition, produced what Greenblatt terms a ‘virtually fetishistic emphasis on manner,’ and meant that performative and adaptive role playing became a supposedly ‘natural’ part of the male courtier's identity.³ Wroth's romance gives us a demystification along gendered lines: it enacts a woman subject's acknowledgement of the power of and yet alienation from the ‘naturalness’ of male display.

Theatrical metaphors, then, carried a particularly intense ideological weight in the lives and writings of the Sidney cousins, not least in relation to the politics of gender. The very act of being a woman author itself involves playing parts that are, as it were, not found in the accepted scripts for women. Yet to take on the role of a writer, as Heather Weidemann points out (and Wroth's treatment by Lord Denny attests), does not in itself produce a ‘happy proliferation of subversion.’⁴ If taking on an unfamiliar role, disguising, and trying to play new parts all suggest liberation from assigned gender identities—as they do, at least for a time, in Shakespeare's comedies, most obviously in As You Like It—they may equally signify the oppression of never having any owned subject position, which is what Pamphilia complains about when she exclaims ‘O afflictions, how many severall ways have you … how many maskes, how many false faces can you procure, to delude inocent faith’ (Newberry 1, fol. 21). The fragility of the theatrical metaphor is never far from the surface in such remarks. The commonplace Renaissance metaphors of the world as the theater of God's glory or the court as a theater of magnificence assert a correspondence between specular surface and underlying reality, where what is acted is part of the natural and providential. But the world of theatricality in Urania is fundamentally insecure and untrustworthy. The acceptance of the self as theatricalized never allows a man or, especially, a woman an escape from assigned roles and actions. If a woman wants to attain to even a fantasy of autonomy, she must act within the confines of the roles assigned to her. In one of the many patently autobiographical episodes in Urania, Wroth tells the story of Lindamira, in which a court lady has her queen's favors withdrawn. Lindamira's career at court is ruined: ‘all her favour was withdrawn as suddenly and directly, as if never had … the night pass'd, they are in their old clothes againe, and no appearance of what was.’ Instead of abandoning the court, she finds that she can only function by ‘remaining like one in a gay Masque’ (Urania, p. 424). She has, it seems, no real self, no owned desires, no stable point from which she can assert her desires apart from those assigned to her as a woman in the court.

The story of Lindamira is one indication of how Wroth's awareness of the theater was not confined to being gazed at in the masques. Yet it must have been especially from studying the masques that Wroth realized how she and other women were trapped and, indeed, molested, in a theatrical space of far more moment than that provided by the masque. Before 1632 and the innovations introduced by Queen Henrietta Maria to court entertainment that were so disapproved of not only by the Puritans, but also by courtiers like Dudley Carleton, women took part only as silent dancers.⁵ Even that had been, in the first decade of James's reign, regarded somewhat uneasily. In The Masque of Queenes (1609), Jonson had introduced court ladies, but men or boy actors still played the female roles in the anti-masque. Bel-Anna, Queen of the Ocean, personifying the queen herself, is described as simply reflecting her husband's masculine virtue, ‘humbling, all her worth / To him that gave it.’ She is, we are told, ‘a spectacle so full of love and grace / Unto your court.’ The masques may have shown Wroth how patriarchy's traditional commodification of women's sexuality was blatantly demonstrated in the silent women on display in the processions and dances of masques and court entertainments. They are scripts for entertainment, but also scripts of gender assignment in the wider world. The ideology of sexual hierarchy and gender assignment in the masques is consistent and blatant: in Campion's The Lord's Masque, male masquers are ‘men fitt for wars,’ the female masquers are statues that are eventually transformed into ‘women fitt for love.’ If the active male body is at the heart of the male fantasy of autonomy, the unmoving female body is meant to be a body on display, and, by implication, available to be touched at will by the males.⁶

For all the modern interest in Jacobean masques, it is curious that there has been little analysis of their gender politics. It may be that the masque is so obviously archaic and of largely antiquarian interest that it seems hardly worth subjecting to rigorous cultural analysis. But the masque was the most prestigious ‘literary’ form of the age, one in which a vast proportion of the court and therefore the country's wealth was invested, and no less than, say, Disneyland or Madonna today, deserves analysis, at the very least, to reveal the ways by which it formed and articulated its society's dominant ideologies—not least those of gender. Wroth is all the more interesting, therefore, in that she provides the rare occurrence of a critique of the masque and its gender assumptions from a woman's viewpoint—and by someone who took part in masques. Her treatment of the ways that women and women actors are produced by their dramatic contexts is valuable precisely because it is articulated by a product of the system she is attempting to demystify. What Weidemann terms the instability that ‘necessarily attends the construction of the female subject’ in the period is all the more powerful because of its being spoken by someone who was in the subject-ed position within the system she is critiquing, further who had been marginalized, and, at the time she is writing, was like Lindamira, expelled from it. Is Urania, as Lamb suggests, in part motivated by Wroth's anger towards the court that cast her adrift?⁷

Over and over, Wroth's female characters describe the pressures they feel beset by in terms of theater, performance and display. The forsaken Lindamira feels she can regain the queen's favor only by ‘remaining like one in a gay masque,’ even while ‘she was only afflicted’ (Urania, p. 424), and she ponders her tactics of self-presentation, deciding that her best image is to ‘effect silence,’ returning to the state of Jonson's and Campion's female statues. Theatricality, like gender assignment itself, is beset by ambivalence. Taking part in a masque, like entering the court itself, offers the illusion of power, even or perhaps especially to the otherwise powerless female subject. But, in fact, it creates her as the product of both a collective gaze and the gazes of individual men. What reactions might a woman have in this situation? I have elsewhere discussed a poem in which Pamphilia was able to, as it were, turn the gaze back on the gazers.⁸ But that is a rare note. Usually the situation is one in which the woman is perplexed, even victimized:

Like to the Indians, scorched with the sunne,
The sunn which they doe as theyr God adore
So ame I us'd by love, for ever more
I worship him, less favors have I wunn,
Better are they who thus to blacknes runn
And soe can only whitenes want deplore
Then I who pale, and white ame with griefs store,
Nor can have hope, butt to see hopes undunn;
Beesids theyr sacrifies receavd's in sight
Of theyr chose sainte: Mine hid as worthies rite;
Grant mee to see wer I my offrings give,
Then lett me weare the marke of Cupids might
In hart as they in skin of Phoebus light
Nott ceasing offrings to love while I Live.

(Poems, p. 99)

Whether, as Roberts suggests, line 5 refers to Wroth's memory of having taken part in Blacknesse, what Weidemann terms ‘theatrical consciousness,’ is certainly at the forefront of the poem.⁹ Pamphilia describes herself as a masquer, ‘receavd’ in sight of the court; without the identity afforded by the court and its ritual theatricals she is ‘worthless.’ Yet to be chosen to play a role in the specular theater of the court is to be disclosed as the court's creation, and so individually exploitable and expendable. At best it may serve to reveal the constructed nature of being a woman—but that may be an unbearable burden for her, since there appears to be so little possibility of changing her state. To discover that one is constructed in ways one did not suspect is a recurring and disillusioning discovery in Urania: the work actually opens with a ‘masked’ woman, a shepherdess who has just learnt to her bewilderment that she is, in fact, high born, and who thus is unable to say who she ‘really’ is. The opening episode is an ironic reversal of the classic family romance: instead of the pleasurable fantasy of having noble parents, Urania is distressed to find that she is not, as she had supposed, a humble shepherdess. Thereafter, as the work unfolds, the divided desires of the book's title character become characteristic of all the women. In the main group of plots, centered on Pamphilia, despite her insistence on truth and transparent virtue, she continually finds herself regretting that she must play roles in accord with others' desires: ‘Pamphilia made some signe of Joye, but a Signe indeed it was for how could joye come where such desperate sorrow did abound, yet the Seeming gave great content to all the beholders (Newberry 1, fol. 21). She continually blames herself for appearing to dissemble: ‘when did I ever play so foolish a part? justly may I bee condemned for this error, and blamed for so much lightnes’ (Urania, p. 321).

Yet how can a woman in the court avoid playing parts? Obviously enough, Pamphilia's roles include those of a queen, a friend, a daughter, but also, more deviously, those of a lover, a deceiver of rivals in love, and especially that of a contented friend to her cousin, while at the same time vowing love to him and bewailing his continual infidelities. In the masque presented by the seer Lady Mellisea, as in the Jacobean court, the masquers sing and perform, then pull off their vizards, and dance with the ladies. Wroth presents an image of nostalgic happiness, an idealized picture of ‘Emporesses, all the kings, and princes.’ Then it is as if such an ideal image is always in danger of disappearing: ‘Butt heere we have longe stayd, therfore we must a while leave this Court in all hapines, and content’ (Newberry 1, fol. 15). That seems to have been, for Wroth, the overwhelming force of the theatrical activities and the theatrical self-presentation of the court: to draw attention to its own ephemeral nature, while never providing the means to construct an alternative. Late in the 1621 edition of Urania, the princess Lisia tells of how a lady is suspected of scandal at court, leaves, and then tries to recreate the ideal image of joy and gaiety:

at last [she] sought company, some she got together, but of what sort? those that were of the age before, who having young minds rumbled up their old carcases, and rubd over their wrinckling faces like old wainscot new varnished: and little sweeter was some of their beauties … an noise they also made of mirth, banqueting and inviting company, but all would not serve, the glaringst signe, or greatest bush, drawes not in the best company: no more did they make the Court much the fairer. Dance they did, and all ridiculous things that ancient, but young made women could invent to do … Lord how I admird the alteration, and the place, being changd from what it was, as much as from a Court to a Playhouse.

(Urania, p. 486)

It is an astonishing demystification of the court, its theatricalities and self-dramatizations projected upon the women interpellated into its self-admiring system. How intriguing, too, that it is the playhouse that is used to represent at once the downfall and disgrace of exile from the court, and yet, by extension, an alternative to it.

Perhaps the most striking example of the theatrical metaphor in Urania is the complex episode in the second part which is centered on a masque presented in Pamphilia's honor by her eventual husband, Rodomandro, King of Tartaria. The masque celebrates the triumph of Honor over Cupid; it thus stages the Tartarian king's high-minded virtue by comparison with his rival Amphilanthus, who is identified with Cupid. Rodomandro plays his role so well, conveying his deep and virtuous love for Pamphilia so effectively—if not to the lovetorn queen, then certainly to the assembled company—that Amphilanthus reacts with violent jealousy, and confronts Pamphilia with his love. He promises absolute fidelity to her, and together they take public vows of intent—‘performed,’ we are told in an ambiguous ceremony, ‘butt nott as an absolute marriage though as perfect as that’ (Newberry 1, fol 14). But their vows are never fully consummated, a lesson underlined by the masque. Cupid is subjected to Honor, just as in her life as a queen Pamphilia must submit to Honor rather than Passion, and Wroth's love for her cousin had to be subordinate to the demands of the family and her role in its aggrandizement.

Reading Wroth's life in relation to Urania's concerns with the theatrical, an intriguing contrast between the two cousins emerges. In his career, as in his poems and letters, Pembroke presents himself as a male wanting to be in control of the events in which he was caught, a man who risked little, keeping his private affairs strictly subordinate to his public roles, never (at least after the Mary Fitton affair) allowing passion to triumph over honor. By contrast, his cousin, as a woman, was far more subject to others' desires, except (and perhaps only briefly) in her writing and her sexuality. As Pamphilia's struggles show, a woman may create a fantasy of control; but generally, to take a part in the specular theater of a male-dominated world is, for a woman, to lack any material agency. Hence it is all the more intriguing that, of the two Sidney cousins, Pembroke remains the relatively aloof patron of the drama, the presider over court entertainments; Wroth—positioned as a woman as part of the spectacle of the court and its theater—wrote a play. Her venture into playwriting, however, is indicative of the limited possibilities afforded to women: where Aphra Behn fifty years later could write plays for the public stage, Wroth's was designed at most for private presentation. Until 1989, when it was first published, it existed only in two manuscripts, one imperfect, and it was probably rarely read for over 450 years.

Love's Victory is a pastoral drama in five acts. It portrays the highly idealized romantic interactions of four couples, whose wooings and boohooings are overseen by Cupid and his mother Venus. It was most likely written about the same time as the continuation of Urania, in the early 1620s. Both Josephine Roberts and Barbara Lewalski speculate that it might have been written for private performance, perhaps for Sir Edward Dering (1598-1644). He was a collector of plays and known to present private performances, possibly including women actors. He was also a near neighbor of Wroth's family home in Kent. Dering may have owned the original, unfinished manuscript of the play, now in the Huntington. But there is no evidence for its having been acted at his instigation or at any other time.¹⁰ Lewalski has traced the generic conventions within which it operates: those of the pastoral tragicomedy, which puts into dramatic form the typical atmosphere and themes of the pastoral eclogue. Tasso's Aminta (1580) and Guarini's Il Pastor Fido (1590) are the best known examples of the form. Sidney had disparaged such works as ‘mongrell Tragedi-comedie,’ but by the early seventeenth century tragicomedy had become a respectable and—if we extend its scope to include related and equally mixed works like Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale—dramatic kind. In 1610 Fletcher offered a definition, claiming that ‘it wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings some neare it, which is inough to make it no comidie.’ Lewalski suggests that Wroth probably had only a general awareness of the controversies over the nature and legitimacy of tragicomedy, but in writing Love's Victory, she certainly ‘looked to the canon of the new kind—Tasso, Guarini, Daniel, Fletcher—to provide … the horizon of generic expectations,’ which included lyrical songs and choruses, stock characters and a miraculous ending. There are four pairs of lovers. Recent readers of the play have suggested there are various family references in their names and relationships. The most prominent male lover, Philissus (Philip Sidney?), is in love with Musella (Muse + Stella?), but fears, wrongly as it turns out, that she loves his friend Lissius (Matthew Lister, Pembroke's mother's physician who was, it was gossipped, seen as a possible husband for the dowager countess?) who in turn comes to love Philissus's sister Simeana (Mary Sidney, Pembroke's mother herself?). To complicate the action, Silvesta loves Philissus, but renounces her love for him in favor of Musella, and also rejects the love of the unsophisticated Forester, at least until the play's end. The flirtatious Dalina and the boorish Rustick (yet another satiric portrait of Wroth's late husband?) are also united at the end. Other minor characters interact with these four main couples: Arcas, who tries to slander Philissus and Musella, and so is the play's obligatory villain; the outsider Climeana, who courts Lissius far too blatantly; Fillis and Lacon, who are respectively, the rejected suitors of Philissus and Musella.¹¹

The most important characters in the play's scheme, however, are the two gods, Venus and Cupid, who preside and quarrel over the activities of the mortals. When Lissius scorns the power of love, Venus is insulted and orders that Cupid's hitherto merely mischievous intentions towards the mortals should become more intensified. She announces at the end of Act 1 that she ‘would have all to waile, and all to weepe’ (l.387), and then at the end of Act 3 that she is still dissatisfied that some of her victims are ‘to slightly wounded’ (3.336). Musella reveals to Philissus that her father's will has commanded her to wed Rustick and that she therefore must give him up. Finally, however, Venus intervenes in the lovers' favor, claiming that the miraculous survival and uniting of Philissus and Musella is her own work and giving judgment against the villain Arcas. At the end, like the monarch mingling with the dancers in a masque, the mythological figures appear to and join with the mortals. The play's end can thus be read either as a sentimental celebration of true love winning out or as McLaren argues, something more elevated, a demonstration of the power of Venus and Cupid to humble everyone in the play, even those who seem most immune to love. All the lovers, Cupid assures Venus,

… shall both cry, and sigh, and wayle, and weep,
And for owr mercy shall most humbly creepe.
Love hath most glory when as greatest sprites
Hee downward throwse unto his owne delights.

(2.405-8)

Love's Victory has an attractive languidness that, if we look at the history of dramatic forms in the period, not only has affinities with the masque, but also anticipates the pastoral plays encouraged by Queen Henrietta Maria in the late 1620s and 1630s. There is no evidence that Wroth returned to court to take part in those pastorals: she would have been, after all, a woman in her forties, with a scandalous past, a reputation for frankness or even slander, in debt and without landed or financial power, a poor relation of a family whose influence on the national scene was waning. But it is intriguing to see how her work anticipates many of the fashions that were the taste of the court in the next decade or more.

The conventional machinery of the plays written for Henrietta Maria is all patently evident in Love's Victory: the paraphernalia of Cupid's arrows, love's secrecy, hope, jealousy, impossible chastity, and fortuitous interventions of the deities are all commonplace ingredients of the court entertainments of the 1630s—just as they had been of romance stories, poems and dramas over the previous half century and throughout the long and devious tradition of romance narrative back to the Greek romances. The play's clichés are the familiar ones of the tired Petrarchism typical of much of the court poetry of the time, including Pembroke's: love is ‘a paine which yett doth pleasure bring,’ (2.94), at once a mystery, a gift from heaven, and a perpetual betrayal. These undemanding paradoxes are dressed up in the equally conventional landscape of the court masque: ‘a Landt-shape of Forrest, Hils, Vallies, Cottages, A Castle, A River, Pastures, Heards, Flocks, all full of Countrey simplicity,’ as Jonson describes it in The Sad Shepherd.¹² On a much grander scale, what Jonson depicts is also the landscape of Urania. In fact, in the continuation of the romance, there is an episode that uses the same material: a group of shepherds and shepherdesses, led by a brother and sister, undergo similar experiences. Names also recur: Arcas, Rustick, Magdalina. In the Urania version, a group of young princes and princesses, some of the ‘lost children’ around whom some episodes of the continuation of the romance are built, have been kidnaped by the Sophy of Persia, and they gather together to recount their experiences. The episode serves as a metaphor of escape from the violence in the world outside the pastoral, an attitude that is taken to an extreme by Folietto (a shepherd rather like Rustick), who asserts that even the sufferings of love are largely fictional. In Wroth's dramatized version of the situation (we have no way of saying which was a reworking of which), the political context is omitted. Nonetheless, even in the more seemingly escapist world of dramatic pastoral, the complex world of politics does manage to creep in. On the most elementary level, Wroth brings references from her own far from serene life into the pastoral. The most obvious are the probable references to her (presumably, when the play was written, late) husband in the character of Rustick, who is unsophisticated and vulgar, and unaware of the love between Musella and Philissus; and finally both revealing his ignobility and obligingly allowing a wish fulfillment ending to occur by abandoning his claims to Musella and disavowing all the promises she has self-sacrificingly made to fulfill her father's will that she should marry him. His gesture is perhaps a wistful fantasy on Wroth's part as she looks back on the relations between herself and her father, her cousin, and her husband. The scripts of the family romance play out over and over.

What is especially attractive about Love's Victory is its humor. Jonson had insisted that comedy was a necessary part of court entertainments, even when they were designed as serious celebrations. Love's Victory is permeated not only by humor, but by a crisp irony, which is consistently directed even towards the presiding deities. Their threats are more fustian than serious, and most of the action is lighthearted. Rustick is the continual butt of lighthearted joking: he expresses his love for Musella in terms similar to Sidney's Mopsa in Arcadia: she is ‘whiter then lambs wull,’ her eyes ‘play / like Goats with hay,’ and her cheeks are red as ‘Okar spred / On a fatted sheep's back’ (11.337, 341-2, 348-9). In addition to the overt comedy of the play, its treatment of love is also intriguing. Beneath the clichés of ‘Love's sweet pleasing paine’ (3.372) are some interesting contradictions. As McLaren suggests, much of the action centers on characters' difficulty in communicating, trying to convey their affections and choices to the partner of their desires. Further, she suggests, it is the women who are faced with special difficulties, since they are interpellated into erotically passive roles. The malice of Venus's commands - ‘they shall have torment when they think to smile’ (1.402)—translates into an anxiety born of their roles as women. It is they who are most disadvantaged in communicating and choosing. The extent of the masochism and paralysis in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and Urania never approached, but it is important to note that the one woman character who claims some degree of sexual autonomy, Dalina, is clearly disapproved of. She blatantly asserts:

This is the reason men ar growne soe coy,
When they parceave wee make theyr smiles owr joy.
Lett them alone, and they will seeke, and sue,
Butt yeeld to them and they'll with scorne pursue.
Hold a while of, they'll kneele, and follow you,
And vowe, and sweare, yett all theyr othes untrue.
Lett them once see you coming then they fly,
Butt strangly looke, and they'll for pitty cry.

(3.249-56)

Butt farewell folly, I with Dian stand
Against love's changinge and blinde foulerie,
To hold with hapy and blest chastitie.
For love is idle, hapines ther's none
When freedom's lost and chastity is gon
.....Now love's as farr from mee as never knowne,
Then bacely tyde, now freely ame mine owne.

(1.126-30, 157-8)

Where the play's heroine, Musella, is overjoyed to be finally married to her beloved and gives appropriately dutiful thanks to the presiding deities, Silvesta claims that independence is preferable, and her rejection of the ideology of benevolent patriarchal marriage is certainly rendered as a far more attractive alternative than Jaques's rejection of the happinesses of the ‘country copulatives’ at the end of As You Like It. Silvesta believes it is possible to ‘make a cleane shift to live without a man’ (5.187). The emphasis on ‘freedom’ and being ‘mine own’ is not rendered ironically: it is clearly an affirmation that defies, without obviously negative consequences, Venus's warning that unless mortals follow her dictates, they ‘will butt frame / Words against your selves.’ Women, according to Venus, should accept their parts in the play of love: ‘Love the king is of the mind / Please him, and hee wilbe kind’ (2.324-5, 330-1). Being ‘mine own’ may not be a sustainable fantasy, but it does mark a woman's assertion of her right to the kind of individuation that seems natural to men. It is, however, worth pointing out the intriguing contradiction here. Being ‘mine owne’ would not meet with the approval of the age's moral orthodoxy for men or women, as the figures of Richard III, Iago, or Edmund remind us. Yet such characters, as Shakespearian commentators have long pointed out, are putting into play an emergent sense of the individualized subject, the Cartesian ‘I,’ that in less than a century will seem as ‘natural’ as it seemed ‘unnatural’ around 1600. All the more significant, therefore, that, as I have suggested, being ‘mine owne’ is at the core of Wroth's gendering of the family romance: for a woman, being like a man involves a degree of autonomy rarely presumed by a woman, and it is significant that it is one of the recurring fantasies of Love's Victory.

As is the case in Wroth's other writings, Love's Victory also places a strong emphasis on female friendship, as a ‘womanspace’ not to be ruled by men. The sharing of stories and gossip—something to be benevolently exchanged among both men and woman, though initiated and presided over by the women—is an attractive aspect of the play that connects it with both Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. It is, however, worth nothing Arbella Stuart's tart remark about the ladies in Queen Anne of Denmark's court (who would have most likely included Mary Wroth herself) and their indulgence in the kind of entertainment favored by Wroth's characters:

certain childeplayse remembred by the fayre ladies. Viz. I pray my Lo. give me a course in your park. Rise pig and go. One peny follow me. &c. and when I cam to Court they weare as highly in request as ever crackling of nuts was. So I was by the m.^rs of the Revelles not onely compelled to play at. I knew not what for till that day I never heard of a play called Fier. but even persuaded by the princely example I saw to play the childe againe.¹³

Trivial though they may have been (though presumably no more than the gossip and boys' games of male courtiers), such activities, especially when exclusively the province of women, may be seen as part of an attempt by the politically powerless to carve out a distinctive space of pleasure and discovery for themselves. In Act 4 of Love's Victory, the lovers play at riddles, and Rustick is laughed at for his ignorance - perhaps another jest at Wroth's husband, who, as we can see from Jonson's poem to Sir Robert Wroth, preferred the company of rural friends and animals and may well have been impatient at such courtly pastimes. As Lewalski notes, the satiric portrait of Rustick not only permits Wroth some amusing asides at her late husband's expense, but also allows her to align herself with the emerging ideology of the Stuart court's valorization of the urban pastoral, as opposed to the rustic values of the country, and to stress the dominance of the women, secure in their own discursive space. In Act 3, the game is played only by the women, who share their stories of past loves. Dalina tells stories of what the moral orthodoxy of the time would term her fickleness though another way of describing her activities might be in terms of sexual autonomy and experimentation, activities presumably acceptable for men, but forbidden to women. As in Urania, Wroth stresses that voicing such desires may lead only to pain, and thus a woman is well advised to accept her place within a benevolent marriage. Dalina's desire for the security marriage offers, therefore, comes through in her amused but still serious vow to accept the next proposal she receives. Simeana then tells of her constancy and of her secret hopes regarding an unnamed lover. Fillis tells of her unrequited love for Philissus. Climena tells of following a lover who later rejected her and of her present love for Lissius. While there are warnings that each may not necessarily be telling the whole truth, the scenes are a touching and (especially when Simeana and Climena quarrel) amusing revelation of the mixture of subjection, fantasy, and realism of women's roles in trying to find some alternative spaces within a gendered script they did not write.

For we can also see emerging from the scene what Lewalski terms ‘an implicit feminist politics’ that is unusual in the genre in which Wroth is writing.¹⁴ Not only is Venus rather than Cupid the dominant presiding deity, but more importantly, among the mortals the women's actions are more dominant and forceful. I have argued that the dominant fantasy of the woman's family romance is in effect to occupy the brother's place, to have the possibility of inheriting the father's autonomy and movement.¹⁵ But there is another, perhaps more mature, fantasy in the family romance for women and men alike, one that is often enacted in Urania but only hinted at in Love's Victory as it was in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. It is the fantasy of a mutual love regardless of gender, an erotopia of mutuality. It is a fantasy of community, not of competitive individualism. Significantly, therefore, where the values of community and human relations are central, it is significant, as Miller puts it, that they are mainly asserted by the women. Musella is a faithful confidant to men and women alike, especially in helping to reunite Lissius and Simeana. Dalina advises Simeana to act cautiously at first, and then, when they hear Lissius's confession of his love, to respond encouragingly. Musella in particular articulates for herself and her companions a clear range of choices and options: while misjudging Philissus's love for her, she does eventually respond to him, and takes Simeana's advice to think through her situation. Musella discovers herself in conflict with her mother's desire that she obey her father's will, and she contemplates:

                                                                                 … my state
Agreed on by my father's will which bears
Sway in her brest, and duty in mee. Fate
Must have her courses, while that wreched I
Wish butt soe good a fate as now to dy.

(5.12-15)

Ethical questions arise here that were common to women of Wroth's class and which she herself had been deeply affected by, above all: is Musella bound to marry Rustick because of her father's will? Unlike many women in the Jacobean court, including perhaps Wroth herself, Musella seizes the initiative. It is she who decides that she and Lissius should visit the temple of Venus, where they will either find some mysterious end to their dilemma or die together. In a pastoral romance, as in a daydream, the miraculous wishfulfilment comes true.

Thus at the play's end we can see an interesting contradiction. We could say that the triumph of the lovers is as much a victory for perseverance as for love. The pastoral genre, of course, prepares us for a marvelous ending—the revival of the statue of the dead Hermione in The Winter's Tale, the return of Cymbeline's children, the reuniting of Pericles, Thaisa, and Marina—but as with Shakespeare's romances, the miracles at the end of Love's Victory are as much decided by human, and specifically female, agency as by supernatural intervention. Philissus and Musella go to the temple; they are about to stab themselves in a last act of mutual devotion when Silvesta offers them a more convenient method, a poison that (seeingly) kills them. Then she and Simeana inform the others what has happened. Rustick disclaims all rights to Musella, at which point the apparently dead lovers revive. This happy ending against all possible odds, including death, must have embodied a common fantasy for Wroth and her circle: that in the opposition between duty and love, reason and passion, if love could be pursued absolutely, it would be rewarded by the gods. Venus claims that Silvesta has been an ‘instrument ordain'd,’ and ‘when Venus wills, men can nott but obay’ (5.490, 536). These sentiments reassert the pastoral convention that all events are benevolently controlled by a mysterious providence; they also reassert the equal beneficence of providential patriarchy—yet that conclusion has been made possible by the devotion and cunning of the lovers themselves, especially the women. And at the level of fantasy enactment, something even more intriguing is emerging: the autonomy of men, envied by women, is maybe not finally satisfying, even to men. Enacted even briefly, contained in Love's Victory is, once again, a fantasy of mutuality.

Notes

1. Naomi J. Miller, ‘Engendering Discourse,’ pp. 154-72 in Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (eds) Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991; Margaret [Witten-Hannah] McLaren, ‘Lady Mary Wroth's Urania: The Work and the Tradition,’ unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Auckland, 1978.

2. Sir Francis Bacon, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 118.

3. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 162.

4. Heather L. Weidemann, ‘Theatricality and Female Identity in Mary Wroth's Urania,’ in Miller and Waller (eds) Reading Mary Wroth, pp. 206-7.

5. Suzanne Gossett, ‘“Man-maid, begone!” Women in Masques,’ English Literary Renaissance 18(1988), 96-113.

6. Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), I, pp. 243, 245.

7. Weidemann, ‘Theatricality,’ p. 200; Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p. 25.

8. Gary Waller, The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of Gender (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1993), ch.6.

9. Weidemann, ‘Theatricality,’ p. 202.

10. Josephine A. Roberts, ‘The Huntington Manuscript of Lady Mary Wroth's Play, Love's Victory and the Pastoral Tragicomedy,’ in Miller and Waller (eds) Reading Mary Wroth, p. 88.

11. Barbara Lewalski, ‘Mary Wroth's Love's Victory and Pastoral Tragicomedy,’ in Miller and Waller (eds) Reading Mary Wroth, pp. 88-108.

12. Jonson, VII, p. 7.

13. Sara Jayne Steen, ‘Fashioning an Acceptable Self: Lady Arbella Stuart,’ English Literary Renaissance, 18(1988), 84.

14. Lewalski, ‘Mary Wroth's Love's Victory and Pastoral Tragicomedy,’ p. 96.

15. Waller, Sidney Family Romance, pp. 37-46.