ABSTRACT
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 herwas 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.
