ABSTRACT
Josephine Roberts’ edition of the poems of Lady Mary Wroth has allowed the widespread dissemination of the sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, and has been instrumental in establishing Wroth as a primary example of the Renaissance woman poet. Wroth is positioning her sequence in a wide political and religious frame, and in a Protestant literary tradition integrating both Sidneian and radical Spenserian agendas. The privileging of the private in the criticism of this sequence both ignores Wroth’s own political alignment with a group of radical Protestant writers within the Jacobean court, and also reads the sections of the sequence advocating a Utopian Protestant court and the speaker’s central role in that court only in terms of the private frame implicit in the ambitious Protestant courtier’s rhetoric. It allows Barbara Lewalski to argue explicitly that “in claiming the Petrarchan love sequence for the female lover-poet, Wroth did not use it as male courtiers often did, for overt political purposes”.
