Sonnet 11 - Lady Mary Wroth

Sonnet 11 is - well, a sonnet.  And all that a sonnet form implies.


It is from a collection of poems called Pamphilius to Amphilanthus.  A quick google search will bring up a long list of possible resources.




Wroth was primarily concerned with gender roles throughout this sonnet series, and the series itself is not truly original.  Critics seem widely convinced that the series is based on a work of Sir Philip Sidney's, a collection known as Astrophil and Stella.  On that point, Jennifer Laws writes:

And yet, when I actually read Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, what strikes me is not its similarity to Astrophil and Stella, but its differences, particularly in relation to gender issues. In place of the lively and at times even assertive Stella, there is the passive and victimised Pamphilia who cannot free herself from the perfidious Amphilanthus. Whereas Sidney seems deliberately to break sonnet conventions by creating not so much an idealised representation of remote feminine beauty as a living responsive human being who can act, Wroth allows her woman to remain inactive and helpless, the victim of another's behaviour. And this is in spite of the fact that the woman in Wroth's sequence has become the poet/narrator; no longer an object, she is now the speaking subject. The opportunities one might imagine that this reversal of roles could bring -- either for female wooing or for the scornful rejection of unwanted male attention -- are simply passed by. Pamphilia remains throughout unfulfilled and yet a model of patient constancy.

(Laws, 1996)


One of the Pamphilius to Amphilanthus online resources, written by Richard Bear, has a very informative introduction on Lady Mary Wroth's life and works.  He notes:

Mary Sidney was married in 1604 to Sir Robert Wroth. The match apparently was not a happy one {4}. Her husband ran up massive debts and died in 1614, leaving the young widow to apply to the King for relief from her creditors. She had one child from her marriage, who died at about the age of two, and two "natural" children whose father was William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, her first cousin and very probably the person in her life for whom Amphilanthus is a persona.

(Bear, 1992)


It is important to note that in this sonnet series, Lady Wroth is subtly subverting - though not reversing! - the classical Petrarchan model of a male in passionate romantic pursuit of the female love-interest.

The sequence opens with the dream vision of Pamphilia, whose name means "all-loving," in which she describes the triumph of Venus and Cupid over her heart. The first section of 55 poems reveals Pamphilia's conflicting emotions as she attempts to resolve the struggle between passionate surrender and self-affirmation. The Petrarchan model of the male lover wooing a cold, unpitying lady posed a genuine challenge to Wroth, who could not simply reverse the gender roles. Instead of presenting her female persona in active pursuit of Amphilanthus, whose name means "lover of two," Wroth completely omits the Petrarchan rhetoric of wooing and courtship. She addresses most of the sonnets to Cupid, night, grief, fortune, or time, rather than directly to Amphilanthus, whose name appears only in the title of the sequence.

(Extract from larger article on The Poetry Foundation website.  Useful stuff there.)

Hope this helps!

For further reading on Lady Mary Wroth, see this article by Carolyn Campbell, 2001.

- T. Marcus