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The last major Petrarchan sonnet sequence in English, Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, appeared in print with the author’s prose romance, The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania. The date of its publication was 1621 (Stationers’ Register, 13 July), a year of political catastrophe for James I and of crisis in the formation of English ideas about nation, state, and political liberty . Nearly a century earlier Henry VIII’s Act of Appeals (1533) had proclaimed that “this realme of Englond is an Impire,” a sovereign community beholden to the authority of no foreign ruler, including the pope.1 The trajectory of English literary history from Henry’s proclamation of England’s sovereignty to the publication of Wroth’s sonnets abounds in English national sentiment. The development of the sonnet form from Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (composed 1581‒82?), whose pirated publication in 1591 ignited a literary fad, to Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus a long generation later bears traces of sometimes conflicting, sometimes converging ideas about this sentiment.2 It is one that relativizes the differences of national status, rank, privilege, and prestige among various classes in England in a fictional construction attuned to the extraordinary social mobility of the period. Mary Wroth (1586/87‒1651/53) participates in this process as the offspring of a prominent family.3 The niece of Philip Sidney (1554‒86) and of Mary Sidney (1561‒1621) and the daughter of Robert Sidney (1563‒1626), she engaged in forms of literary activity already practiced by her uncle, aunt, and father as well as by her cousin, Mary’s son, William Herbert (1580‒1630).4 All five members of this high-ranking family composed poetry in the Petrarchan mode. 163 Courtly and Anti-Courtly Sidneian Identities 8 Philip Sidney, Robert Sidney, and Mary Wroth wrote sonnet sequences, and William Herbert tried his hand at odes. Mary Sidney translated Petrarch’s Triumph of Death into English blank verse (1590). Each brought to the task a commitment to develop a specifically English literary style with a specifically English sense of cultural identity.5 This identity was strongly Protestant. Philip Sidney reached maturity in the late 1570s at a time when Queen Elizabeth appeared disposed to marry the French king’s younger brother, the Catholic duke of Anjou. Fearing that this match would lead to a policy of French appeasement and papal despotism, a group of Protestant nobles clustered around the earl of Leicester voiced its opposition . Finding an eloquent spokesman in Philip Sidney, the group also decried the temporizing strategies of Queen Elizabeth and Lord Burghley on matters of international policy in the early 1580s.6 For his role in this matter Sidney suffered the queen’s scorn and a period of ostracism from court, during which he wrote much of his literary work at his sister’s estate in Wilton. The term radical Protestant associated with Sidney’s faction (whose members included Walsingham, the earl of Pembroke, Sir Francis Knollys, and the earl of Bedford) bears scant reference to its doctrinal beliefs, for they ranged from a pious endorsement of Queen Elizabeth’s pragmatic via media to a qualified embrace of severe Calvinist teaching. It refers instead to the group’s commitment to a foreign policy shaped in accord with the religious divisions of Europe , in the conviction that England’s political interests would best be served by helping the international Protestant rebellion against the Catholic powers of Spain, France, and the papacy.7 After Philip’s death in 1586, Mary Sidney assumed a cultural leadership for the cause by publishing his belletristic writing, by sponsoring projects modeled upon it, by finishing his translation of Psalms (1585? completed by her and dedicated to Queen Elizabeth in 1599), and by offering her own translation of Philippe Duplessis-Mornay’s Discourse of Life and Death (1592; complementing Philip’s unfinished translation of Mornay’s Trewnesse of the Christian Religion, 1585, completed by Arthur Golding in 1587).8 The concept of nation, state, and liberty inscribed in the Sidneys’ work affirms the legitimacy of monarchical power, the effectiveness of an oppositional strategy dominated by the titled nobility, and the practical agency of the English people as an entity opposed to the powers of Catholic Europe. In the poetry of Philip and Mary Sidney and their niece Mary Wroth, these associations crisscross in patterns to which Petrarchan forms of thought lend striking emphasis. The romance narratives of Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia...

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