Pamphilia to Amphilanthus in Manuscript and Print by Lady Mary Wroth (review)

This much anticipated edition of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus represents a field-shifting contribution to Wroth studies. The volume makes available for the first time in print the two versions of this celebrated sonnet sequence: Wroth’s holograph manuscript miscellany, Folger V.a.104, and the better-known published version, which was appended to the first part of Wroth’s Urania (1621). The textual edition, prepared by Illona Bell and Steven W. May, is exemplary in terms of both clarity and substance, as I will detail further below. What makes this volume especially important for students and scholars of Wroth, however, is the interpretive framework within which Bell positions these two distinct, but crucially interrelated, texts. Her analysis sheds vivid insight into the physical and lyric intimacy of Wroth’s relationship with her cousin William Herbert. It also reveals Wroth to be a daring writer and an editor who carefully reshaped the erotic content of her manuscript poems to prepare a more abstract version suitable for publication.

Critical readings of Wroth’s poetry have long relied on another field-defining edition: Josephine Roberts’s The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, which was published in 1983. Assuming the 1621 Pamphilia to Amphilanthus represented the final, finished version of Wroth’s sequence, Roberts overlooked the significance of the Folger miscellany. Variants and manuscript poems that Wroth ultimately omitted from the printed text are referenced only in notes and appendices. The result is a hybrid edition that elided key differences between the two versions. As Bell notes, “to reconstitute Wroth’s manuscript sequence from Roberts’s edition requires one to flip back and forth or to painstakingly cut and paste poems from three separate sections, and then write in Wroth’s revisions from the list of variants” (8). Roberts’s edition also lays the groundwork for the scholarly tendency to read Pamphilia to Amphilanthus as a “belated” response to the Petrarchan tradition (11): Wroth’s determinedly constant female speaker petitions a largely absent male beloved and eschews physical desires in favor of spiritual transcendence.

This is not in any way to discount the significance of Roberts’s work, which helped to launch Wroth studies and which was, as Bell insightfully emphasizes, a product of its own historical moment both in terms of editorial principles and the development of the field of women’s writing. Still, Roberts’s edition, however inadvertently, had the effect of sidelining the Folger manuscript as a text in its own right. V.a.104 has been attracting increasing scholarly attention in recent years. In 2008, the Folger Shakespeare Library digitized the manuscript, and in 2012 Paul Salzman released an electronic edition of the manuscript poems. In printing Wroth’s manuscript miscellany and the published version of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Bell’s edition builds on this work by drawing attention to the unique features of V.a.104 and by illuminating the vital relationship between these two texts.

As a textual edition, this volume is a model of scholarly rigor and clarity. V.a.104 and the 1621 version of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus appear sequentially, which preserves their shape and feel as distinctive collections. Cross-references and a table of numbers for the manuscript and printed poems (often confusing in other editions) helpfully orient readers who wish to compare particular lyrics. The edition is meticulous in its attention to the visual details of manuscript and print layout, including Wroth’s extant multistage revisions. Glosses and notes are clear and detailed. Taken as a whole, the editorial principles and the presentation of “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus” (V.a.104) and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) demonstrate an admirable combination of accessibility and scholarly precision. This is a volume that will be invaluable both for established Wroth scholars and for students encountering these texts for the first time.

Bell’s...