ABSTRACT
Lady Mary Wroth’s pastoral tragicomedy Love’s Victory was not printed during the author’s lifetime, and has come down to us in two manuscript versions. The first, held in the Huntington Library HM (600) and reprinted with modernized spelling in Paul Salzman’s Early Modern Women’s Writing: An Anthology, 1560-1700, is an incomplete version of the play. its script, which has extensive authorial revisions, lacks a title page and two of the dialogues between Venus and Cupid, and runs up to line 104 of the opening scene of Act 5. in this scene the romantic protagonists Musella and Philisses determine to go to the Temple of Love and “bind our lives or else our lives make free” in order to escape the marriage arranged for Musella to an uncouth shepherd, Rustic. Philisses and Musella each promise to give their life, but the exact nature of the self-sacrifice is not clear. Philisses claims that “to die for thee a new life i should gain” and enjoins Musella “to promise me that you will live.” Musella, likewise, claims that without him “no life can be,” but makes him promise “yourself you will not harm.”The lovers thus seem to dedicate themselves to parallel suicides while simultaneously demanding the preservation of each other. The Huntington script finishes-tantalizingly and abruptly-with this paradox, Philisses intoning: “your will shall be obeyed / Till this life change and i in earth am laid.”1 What will happen when the lovers reach the Temple of Love? How will they keep their vows not to harm themselves and yet fulfill their determinations to die rather than live apart?
