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5. The Rhetorical Sonnet
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The Rhetorical Sonnet 111 111 CHAPTER FIVE The Rhetorical Sonnet Rather than failing to meet the criteria of a standard already set, Lady Mary Wroth’s sonnet sequence reworks even while drawing on the conventions of an established genre; though it may present many contraries of the Petrarchan kind, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus refuses to maintain polar opposition. This is especially true of “A crowne of Sonetts dedicated to Love” (P77–P90), Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’s most stunning achievement.1 The corona, a strict Italianate form, consists of a sequence of sonnets where the last line of one sonnet becomes the first line of the next. A complete corona, like Wroth’s, sees the last line of the final sonnet as the opening line of the first: Wroth’s corona begins and ends with “In this strang labourinth how shall I turne?” (P77, 1; P90, 14). The sonnets are thus linked to make up a formal crown that constitutes a kind of subsequence within the larger sequence of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. As a sequence that ends with a return to its beginning , the corona is a highly contrived poetic form that inevitably draws attention to its own artificiality. Few would likely object to the claim that the “crowne of Sonetts” is a display piece designed to show off its maker’s skill: because it is a display piece, it seems obvious that Wroth’s corona is a publicly directed performance. 112 Women Writing of Divinest Things Wroth’s performative intent is further evidenced by her corona’s exceeding, in length and in strength, those of her male contemporaries and antecedents. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’s crown is the longest and the most elaborate in English, surpassing her uncle’s ten dizaine experiment in Old Arcadia and the incomplete attempts at writing in the form made by her father in Rosis and Lysa, and by Samuel Daniel in Delia; Wroth’s 14 sonnets also exceed the seven of “La Corona,” Donne’s crown of devotion. 2 It is important to note as well that, although Pamphilia to Amphilanthus may have been written before 1613, Wroth did choose to append it to the Urania, a work whose publication suggests that she did indeed anticipate a public audience.3 It is also possible that the poems of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus—like other sonnet sequences—circulated in manuscript before they were published. 4 Given all of these circumstances, it is odd that Wroth’s readers tend to focus on the sequence’s inherently private nature and, as a result, minimize the significance of its function as public performance.5 As a performance, the corona is also (and necessarily) rhetorical; as Greenblatt says, early modern rhetoric “served to theatricalize culture” even as it was also “the instrument of a society which was already deeply theatrical.” 6 Taken together, the poems of Wroth’s “crowne of Sonetts” are perhaps the most theatrical of the entire sequence, its performative nature indicated partly by the corona’s marked difference from the rest of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. 7 Though its readers generally agree that the crown’s opening poem “marks the transition from love poet to divine poet,”8 the coronal change is even more intensely performative than most acknowledge . Since its form demands that the speaker return to where she began, the transition can only ever be temporary; the divine poet of the crown sonnets must always revert back to the love poet who voices the framing sequence, suggesting in the process that the “crowne of Sonetts” should be read as a performance within the performance of the sequence itself. [18.233.223.189] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:13 GMT) The Rhetorical Sonnet 113 In reading the crown’s speaker as “divine poet,” though, we need also to make it clear that the corona may speak of “divine love” but, as Walker puts it, “it is a love still grounded in the material world of human relationships.” 9 That the heavenly and the earthly are not categorical absolutes is most obvious in the crown’s expression of earthly desire within a “perfect circle dedicated to praising love” 10 —the form that, according to Puttenham, almost always “purports eternitie.” Thus, even though Wroth’s poetic circle explicitly praises the pagan god of love, the corona’s marked Neoplatonism and her own religious habits of thought make it difficult to decide whether her speaker praises the classically derived ideal of heavenly love or the Christian God: it...