Mary Wroth and Shakespeare ed. by Paul Salzman and Marion Wynne-Davies (review)

Since the late 1990s, when Maureen Quilligan memorably advocated for the need to "deghettoize" early modern women's writing, scholarship on Mary Wroth has been enriched by readings that push beyond familial influences to situate her innovative texts in dialogue with her contemporaries ("Completing the Conversation," Shakespeare Survey 25 [1997], 42). Wroth's writings show her actively responding to writers like Spenser, Jonson, Elizabeth Cary, and Louise Labé, as well as reworking classical sources like Catullus and Ovid; recent interventions in Wroth studies, meanwhile, have begun to lay the groundwork for explorations of her literary legacy in relation to figures like Margaret Cavendish and Milton (see Larson, "Recent Studies of Mary Wroth," English Literary Renaissance 44.2 [spring 2014]: 342–45). Shakespeare has been a central figure in these discussions, but given Wroth's evident familiarity with his dramatic and poetic output as well as the scope of her engagement with literary developments in early seventeenth-century England, it is surprising that it has taken so long for a dedicated volume exploring these interconnections to emerge. Mary Wroth and Shakespeare represents a welcome and groundbreaking contribution that demonstrates the significance of Wroth's engagement with Shakespeare and, furthermore, underscores the need to read Shakespeare with an eye to Wroth.

The volume begins by exploring questions of literary influence in relation to the content and circulation of the two versions of Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and Shakespeare's Sonnets, which were published a decade before Wroth's poems appeared in print. Ilona Bell, who has transformed our understanding of Wroth's sequence by demonstrating the physicality and eroticism of her manuscript poems addressed to her cousin and lover William Herbert, brings a similar lens to bear on Shakespeare's sonnets to the young man (possibly Mr. W. H.). What, Bell asks, might it mean to read the sonnets as an "unfolding private lyric dialogue" (10)? Her essay brilliantly unpacks moments of linguistic ambiguity and evasion that, as in Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, illuminate the drama of the lovers' exchange and the erotic charge of the poems while also reframing assumptions about their circulation and process of revision. Clare Kinney takes the ambiguity and elusiveness of the poems in a very different, though equally rich, direction. Focusing on the nuances of pronomial choice, she traces how Shakespeare and Wroth negotiate "Petrarchan solitary confinement" (25). While Shakespeare's speaker remains captive to an absence, she argues, Wroth's poems move beyond the "void" (34) of solitary lyric expression in their imagining of mutuality, community, and, ultimately, literary progeny. Gayle Gaskill's essay literalizes this outward-reaching approach to Wroth's poems by creating an "imaginary dialogue" (55) between Pamphilia and the Dark Lady sonnets that draws attention to Wroth's and Shakespeare's distinct reworkings of the Petrarchan experience. Less convincing is Penny McCarthy's essay, which feels dated in its biographical approach to the poems and which pushes the connections between Wroth, Shakespeare, and William Herbert too far.

The four essays that comprise Part Two, "Genre and Gender," take the inter-textual connections between Wroth's Love's Victory and Urania and Shakespeare's dramatic writing as a starting point for considering how drama and romance reflect and negotiate the construction of early modern familial and social relationships. Marion Wynne-Davies examines how the "discontinuities and gaps" (65–66) that characterize parental roles in Wroth's pastoral tragicomedy and King Lear reveal the artificiality and vulnerability of maternity and paternity in early modern England. Akiko Kusunoki reads Love's Victory as self-consciously reworking issues left unresolved in Romeo and Juliet—notably men's jealousy and passion and women's response to arranged marriage—in order to examine the larger question of how women readers in the period might have responded to Shakespeare's plays. Alison Findlay charts the striking parallels between the death-resurrection-marriage narratives that drive Much Ado...