The Politics of Masochism in Mary Wroth's Urania

Mary Wroth's Urania registers a widening fissure in seventeenth-century England between royal claims to discretionary authority and a communitarian view of sovereignty emphasizing counsel and consent. The depictions of erotic torment in Wroth's romance literalize absolutist representations of political obligation as eager abasement to a beloved sovereign, and thereby show how such idealized narratives may compel subjects to assent to their own abuse. Yet even as the Urania relinquishes romanticized notions of rule in favor of a mixed monarchy, its fragmented, incomplete narrative suggests that there is no definitive solution to political discord, only a series of contingent, and necessarily imperfect, responses to the shifting Jacobean terrain.