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Astrophil and Stella likely dates from a period just after the eighteen-year-old Penelope Devereux’s marriage to Lord Rich on 1 November 1581.1 Mindful of the peerage to which he aspired, the author imagines an adulterous affair with this young woman, a daughter of the first earl of Essex, considered for marriage with him in 1576 to end their fathers’ rivalry.2 In 1579 her mother, Lettice Knollys, widow of the first earl of Essex, married Sidney’s uncle and the queen’s favorite, the earl of Leicester, in a scandalous secrecy that incurred the queen’s disfavor. Sidney’s modern biographers concur that Philip, long avid for a prestigious match, no doubt regretted his decision not to marry into this family when he later realized how powerful such a union of the Leicester-Essex lines could have been.3 The later marriage of his widow, Frances Walsingham, to Robert Devereux, the second earl of Essex, and Devereux’s naming of his own sister, the same Penelope, as an instigator of his rebellion against the Crown in 1600 confirm the inbred loyalties and personal allegiances of this circle. Lady Mary Wroth belongs to this circle. As a niece of Philip and Mary, she bore the Sidney-Dudley-Leicester heritage on her father’s and paternal grandmother ’s side, along with its devotion to family and the cause of preserving Philip’s memory as a Protestant martyr. James I named her father baron of Penshurst in May 1608, thereby fulfilling the dream of his father Henry Sidney , who refused that honor for financial reasons in 1572.4 Robert Sidney subsequently advanced in estate in August 1618, when he inherited the title of his uncle, the earl of Leicester, thus reclaiming the fortunes of his mother, Mary Dudley, daughter of the duke of Northumberland.5 Mary Sidney had mean181 Family Narratives The Transitional Space of Petrarchism 9 while acquired the title of countess through her marriage to the earl of Pembroke in 1580. Mary Sidney’s interest in national affairs followed upon her marriage to Pembroke, and it bears directly upon her subsequent literary activity, including her translations of Petrarch’s Triumph of Death (1590); Robert Garnier’s Senecan drama Marc-Antoine, which she published as Antonius in 1592 and again as The Tragedie of Antonie in 1595; and Psalms, completing the work begun by Philip Sidney (published 1599). Her translation of Marc-Antoine as “closet drama” has direct political implications.6 Robert Garnier (1545‒90), a Gallican royalist who served both Charles IX and Henry III as chief judicial magistrate for the Maine province at Le Mans, wrote several historical plays on Greco-Roman and biblical themes, mindful of dramatic parallels between their troubled times and his own after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre which Philip Sidney directly witnessed (23 August 1572). Designed to be read or recited rather than performed as theater, Marc-Antoine (published in Paris in 1578) recounts the civil war between Antony and Octavius amid Cleopatra’s efforts to save her crown. Its contemporary relevance seems clear. If dissolute Antonius almost certainly figures the debauched Henri III, the sober Octavius might figure the king’s younger, more competent brother, François duc d’Anjou, currently on a campaign to free the Netherlands from Spain and, since 1572, a candidate for marriage to Elizabeth I.7 The conflict pits the protagonists’ amatory loyalties against their political allegiances and patriotic sentiments: “For her have I forgone my Country,” Antony admits in the play’s first scene (7‒8), while in act 2 Cleopatra laments the humiliation of “loosing my Realme, loosing my libertie” (405).8 How might Mary Sidney relate the play’s action to the predicament of her own nation in 1590? Cleopatra is a vulnerable female monarch (Elizabeth?) pressed between a besotted lover (Essex?) and an efficient rival ruler (Philip II?). Octavius might be seen both in malo and in bono as either a threat to or a salvation for Cleopatra and her kingdom.9 The duc d’Anjou no longer counted as a suitor for Elizabeth in the 1590s, but, since the imperial might of Spain and the papacy continued to imperil England and Protestant Europe, a portrayal of Octavius in malo might evoke the threat of the Spanish Empire and of Rome. A different portrayal of Octavius in bono might evoke Leicester’s Protestant League intent upon ending England’s isolation by forging an alliance with...

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