ABSTRACT
In Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, the first woman known to have authored a sonnet sequence in English must perforce reshape the conventions of Petrarchism to accommodate the anomalous situation in which a female poet/lover records her painful emotional enthralment to a male beloved. 1 Her renegotiation of the Petrarchan paradigm results in both suggestive supplementations and telling subtractions. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus' s material framing, for example, is unprecedented: it is printed as a kind of appendix within the 1621 published portion of Wroth's Urania and, as Wendy Wall has noted, the presentation of the lyric sequence as the work of the romance narrative's heroine, with its concomitant insistence upon the fictionality of Pamphilia the female poet/lover, distances the author from her potentially scandalous, intermittently autobiographical, and perhaps all too authoritative representation of female desire (336-37).2 At the same time, Wroth produces a sonnet sequence in which the object of the speaker's love is almost invisible: Amphilanthus is never addressed by name, never represented in the fetishizing terms of a blazon, and the reader is almost half-way through the sequence before she even encounters a masculine pronoun gendering the person the poems celebrate. 3
But if the hybrid romance-lyric text created by the splicing of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus on to the Urania finesses the issue of Wroth's 'culpability' as a woman author who refuses to confine herself to devotional or moral matter, and if the sonnets eschew certain fashionings of the beloved that might be construed as transgressive (given that the male body is not, officially, culturally imaginable as an object offemale desire), her lyrics nevertheless articulate an anxiety about a rather particular kind of misrepresentation or 'wrong conseite' (P11.13). The
customaryPetrarchanprovocationtowritingisthechasteresistance,disdainor indifferenceofanidealizedwoman;poeticproductivityisbornoutoferotic frustration.Inaculturalcontextwherechastityisagenderedvirtue,however,the situationsofthemaleandfemalePetrarchistcannotbesymmetrical:when Wroth/Pamphiliaidentifiesherselfwithashepherdessbewailingherlover's inconstancywhorecordsonthebarkofawillow'thistaleofhaplesmee'(P7. 35),thattalemaybequitedifferentfromtheoneimaginedbyherunclePhilip Sidney'sAstrophilwhenheimploresStellato'pitythetaleofme'(Astrophiland Stella45).AreadingofPamphiliatoAmphilanthusisnotonlylikelytobe informedbyforeknowledgeoftheUrania'sverythoroughchroniclingof Amphilanthus'serranciesandinfidelities,butalsoinflectedbyanextra-textual awarenessofthevicissitudesofWroth'sownsituationasloverofthe philanderingWilliamHerbert.Andthesequence'slyricspeakerisintheendless concernedwiththeculpabilityofherdesire(ortheculpabilityofherchoiceto framethatdesireinpoetry)thanwiththechallengetoher'constantart's idealizingrepresentationsofferedbyapowerfulcounterdiscourse:the'secrett art'ofJealousy.
