1983/04/01 by Josephine A. Roberts
Arts and Humanities · Medicine · Social Sciences · #Literature: history, themes, analysis #Literature Analysis and Criticism #Migration, Policy, and Dickens Studies
paper · doi:10.2307/3817325
Lady Mary Wroth, the niece of Sir Philip Sidney, began her writing career as early as 1613, when the poet Joshua Sylvester boldly proclaimed her as Sidney's successor, whom her Uncles noble veine renewes.1 Although she composed a large body of lyric poetry, including a complete sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, she is best known for her lengthy prose romance, The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (1621), which was written on the model of Sidney's Arcadia. During the early seventeenth century she received dedications from a number of fellow authors, including Ben Jonson, who addressed The Alchemist to her. One of Lady Mary's finest and heretofore unrecognized achievements is an unpublished pastoral play, Loves Victorie, which exists in an autograph manuscript at the Huntington Library (HM 600). This five act play, presenting a pair of mythological commentators who oversee the romantic follies of four human couples, has previously been cataloged as anonymous. The manuscript, incomplete at the beginning and end, contains authorial corrections that reveal the process by which the drama was composed. The Huntington manuscript can be attributed to Lady Mary on the basis of the evidence in the author's eight signed autograph letters that have survived.2 Of these eight letters, two are in a formal italic hand, while the remaining six, written to personal friends or associates, are in a cursive italic hand. Loves Victorie is also written in two hands, as C. H. J. Maxwell detected.3 What Maxwell did not notice, however, is that these two hands match well with Lady Mary's hands in her autograph letters. In her official correspondence with persons of high rank, such as Queen Anne and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, Lady Mary uses a formal italic hand slightly inclined towards the right. This hand is notable for the use of numerous pen lifts and the separation of the individual letters of the words, with the exception of the paired consonants ch, ct, and st. In writing the consonants b, d, f, and h, Lady Mary uses clubbed ascenders, which became fashionable in the 1620s.4 Other prominent features of this hand include the capital letter I, consisting of a looped hook and crossed curve, and the capital letter L, with its elaborately flourished descender. Much of the Huntington manuscript of Loves Victorie is in a formal italic hand which strongly resembles that found in Lady Mary's autograph letters (fig. 1). Following the title of the play, the author employs the same