 | Pamphilia, to Amphilanthus: A Sonnet Sequence
from the Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania |  |
NOTES
This quote is from the title page of the Urania, which omits to mention Lady Mary Wroth's deceased husband, other than by the fact of her married name. Lady Mary Wroth was primarily identified as a Sidney, and shared the intellectual and literary heritage of the famous writers who preceded her.
This thumbnail biographical sketch owes much to a more comprehensive one by Margaret P. Hannay in Women Writers of the Renaissance, cited below.
Robert Sidney wrote to his wife after a visit with his new son-in-law that the young man had something "that doth discontent him: but the particulars I could not get out of him, onely that hee protests that hee cannot take any exception to his wife, nor her carriage towards him. It were very soon for any unkindness to begin." From a letter in the collections at Penshurst, quoted by Hannay (551).
Roberts, p. 85, has "shutt." Neither the compositor, nor Roberts, nor Hannay, p.554 (modernized), seems to regard this as "shoot," but to me this makes more sense. Wroth's spelling is very anglo-saxon.
The Court of Love, a traditional theme, undergirds the courtly love ideology by close analogy with the lord-and-vassal relationships inherited from medieval feudalism.
Comparison of eyes to the sun or stars is a commonplace of Petrarchism, but the star image was of particular interest to all the Sidneys. "Astrophil" is of course "lover of a star," and "Stella" is "star"; Josephine Roberts reports that Sir Robert Wroth often used star/eye images in his (unpublished) sonnets ( Poems 86).
Sights string: the Pythagoreans thought light originated from the objects seen; the Platonists thought that light originated from the sun, from objects, and most of all from the eye; Renaissance ideas on this subject favored Plato.
Willow: emblem of weeping. Popular ballads held that spurned women pine away and die under the sign of the willow. "Bury Me Beneath the Willow" and "On Top of Old Smokey" are modern examples of the genre.
Loue: Cupid. Lovers are bound by feudal ties of fealty to Love as their lord. See Petrarch, Rime, and Dante, La Vita Nuova.
Optaine: "p" here is a common compositor's error, an inverted "d." These letters in the typeface used were mounted on the same size type body and when placed in the composing stick, one looks almost identical to the other. A very similar error, "n" for "u" and vice versa, which is called a "turned" letter, occurs frequently in the 1621 text I have retained and noted these rather than silently emnding them, to keep some feel for the original.
Camelion: chamelion. Lethargic and long-lived in captivity without being fed, chamelions were popularly thought to "eat the air", Hamlet III.ii.
Petrarchan oxymorons: heate/frosts, wanting/surfet, burne/freeze. Compare Rime CXXXII: "E tremo a mezza state, ardendo il verno," and CXXXIV: "E temo, e spero; et ardo, e son un ghiaccio." The tradition was overused in unskillful hands and was often satirized: see Astrophil and Stella, Sonnet 6, and Romeo and Juliet, I.1.
Humors: "Moisture, juice, or sap; also a mans disposition or fansy. [2nd def.] Bloud, Choler, Phlegme, and Melancholie." Coles' English Dictionary, 1676. Ben Jonson was fascinated by the theory of humours; here "humors" seems to refer primarily to melancholia, which was closely related to love in the Renaissance mind.
22.: Josephine Roberts (99) and Margaret Hannay (553) both link this poem to Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness [1606], in which Lady Mary acted a part.
This: "The hart which fled to you." A popular Petrarchism: compare Thomas Wyatt's "Helpe me to seke."
The heart is considered by Aristotle, still authoritative in the early seventeenth century, to be the sense organ that detects emotions.
Gloze: (Roberts: "glose," p. 111) covered over, as in "glazed." Coles' English Dictionary [1676] defines it as "to flatter."
This line recalls the image in the first sonnet of the exposed heart; Pamphilia feels keenly the inequity of the social ostracism which she, but not her lover, receives from society under the double standard.
In manuscript, this song in hexameter couplets is arranged in quatrains. Here, it is in three sestets and an separate couplet; the effect is that of an expanded sonnet. Roberts (117) refers the reader to Book IV of Ovid's Metamorphoses for the injury done his mother by Cupid; but I suspect the reference is to Book X; in Arthur Golding's translation of 1567:
An arrow sticking ovt did raze her breast vppon the bare.
The Goddesse being wovnded, thrust away her sonne. The wovnd
Appeered not to bee so deepe as afterward was fovnd (606-9).
She then falls in love with, not Mars, but Adonis. The Metamorphoses, widely available both in Latin and in Arthur Golding's popular translation was of great importance to the Elizabethans, concerned as they were with "mutabilitie". Wroth shares this interest, especially in view of Amphilanthus' tendency to "change" (forsake Pamphilia for another). The tales of Ovid, as a background or horizon to the complaints of Pamphilia, add poignancy to her despair for her project of stabilizing the relationship.
Wheele: Fortune's Wheel, often represented in Renaissance art as bearing several men, one riding up to fame and fortune, another resplendent in short-lived glory, another riding down to his fall and destruction.
God: Mercury. He puts Argus, who has a thousand eyes, to sleep with music played on a reed pipe. Ovid, Metamorphoses I: "And as he went he pyped still upon an Oten Reede," lines 842ff. (Golding).
Goodwins: the Goodwins Sands, shoal waters on the English coast where many ships foundered. Compare Petrarch, Rime CLXXXIX ("Passa la nave"), and also the translations of the Petrarch by Wyatt and Surrey.
The Crowne she offers is a "crown" of sonnets. This poem serves as the introduction to the group of poems immediately following.
A "crowne" orcorona is a series of short poems, such as sonnets, linked by the last line of each serving as the first line of the following, with the last line of the last poem reprising the first line of the first, closing the circle. Wroth's corona contains an impressive fourteen sonnets.
Labyrinth: a reference to the labyrinth of Minos. Theseus enters the labyrinth to defeat the Minotaur, but cannot escape without the assistance of Ariadne. See Golding, XIII.225ff.
Prophet: this is "profitt" in the manuscript version (Roberts 130); Roberts notes that a pun is intended.
Hemlocke: poison hemlock is a low-growing, attractive herb that grows on the margins of streams and in flood plains. It is extremely poisonous, inducing rapid paralysis when ingested, and was used in the execution of Socrates.
Holly: holy. This is in keeping with the move toward spiritualization of love in this "Crowne."
The return to this line suggests that the thread Pamphilia has been following has not led her to safety. Her focus on constancy as a spiritual discipline has been strengthened, but she is still victimized by jealousie.
Philomel: the nightingale. Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, tells of the transformation of Philomela into a nightingale after a violent rape. In Golding, VI.578ff.
flame: she burns with love for the youth Adonis. Ovid, Metamorphoses X.604ff (Golding).
the type of the jealous wife, sought her shape-changing philandering husband throughout the world, but he generally stayed one step ahead of her. See Ovid, Metamorphoses:
With svch escapes and with the deede had often him attainted.
Whome when she fovnd not in the heauen: Onlesse I gvess amisse,
Some wrong agaynst me (qvoth she) now my hvsbande working is.
And with that worde she left the Heauen, and down to earth shee came...
(Golding I.749-53)
probably a portrait painting or miniature (perhaps of William Herbert at Penshurst?). Pamphilia is afraid her interest in it will give her away, but takes comfort in her possession of a truer image in her heart.
Glasse: in this case, an hourglass (see next line), but with perhaps a double entendre on the usual word for "mirror."
In manuscript (Roberts 142), this poem, like Sonnet 48 above, is signed by the persona, Pamphilia, adding an emphatic tone of self- awareness and address, of publication to Amphilanthus, which gives the final couplet more force and direction than in the printed text which we have followed here. Thus who have read and enjoyed this etext edition are urged to continue on to Robert's The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, which recovers the robust spelling and punctuation of a text that has been, perhaps, somewhat unconsciously and damagingly patronized by those, undoubtedly men, who set up and printed the Urania in 1621.
| Pamphilia, to Amphilanthus: A Sonnet Sequence
from the Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania | |