ABSTRACT

What immediately strikes the modern reader of Mary Wroth’s sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is its sustained lack of reference. Pamphilia differs from Hamlet in the crucial matter of gender, and, as Catherine Belsey has persuasively argued, the construction of the male subject in this period was accomplished against a female Other. The manuscript known as Pamphilia to Amphilanthus may not be a circulating sonnet sequence at all – or at least not in the way we have understood it to be. In her edition of Wroth’s poems, Roberts asserts that the manuscript represents an early version of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and assumes that Wroth circulated her sonnets among her friends. Wroth, as a woman-writer, must resist publication as a form of male trafficking, yet that resistance can only register if it is made public. It is ironically appropriate, then, that Pamphilia marries not in the published Urania but in the unpublished continuation.