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Since the belated revival of Mary Wroth's early seventeenth century oeuvre
during the late twentieth century--marked especially by Roberts's pioneering
effort in producing The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's
Urania (1995)--students of Wroth have eagerly awaited the publication
of the manuscript continuation of the Urania, which is housed as
a unique holograph edition in the Newberry Library, Chicago. Roberts,
whose brilliant career as a committed Wroth scholar was cut short by her
untimely death in 1996, stood at the forefront of recovering a text obscured
by Jacobean opposition to women's publication and subsequent scholarly
inattention to publishing women in seventeenth-century England. Suzanne
Gossett and Janel Mueller continued the work begun by Roberts to issue
The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania as
an impressive scholarly edition sponsored by the Renaissance English Text
Society in conjunction with the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance
Studies. With this publication, Wroth's complete oeuvre of published
and unpublished works may be accessed in modern print editions.
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Gossett and Mueller frame The Second Part of the . . . Urania
with a Textual Introduction that addresses the challenges of editing Wroth's
manuscript in particular, and seventeenth-century women's writing more
generally. In addition to the detailed Textual Introduction, this edition
is generously supplied with illustrations from the holograph manuscript
and select maps to help situate the textual and political geography of
the Urania; the edition concludes with a series of addenda that
enable the reader to make sense of the complex relationships connecting
the Urania's far-flung cast of characters. Gossett's contribution
to the Textual Introduction (sections 1, 2, 3, 6, and 7) stresses the
paleographic aspects of the editorial task, including the description,
history, and nature of the manuscript. Questions she addresses include
the dating of the manuscript Urania, significant because the published
Urania was so vociferously suppressed by vested interests within
the Jacobean aristocratic patriarchy. What remains fascinatingly unresolved
for contemporary students of Wroth, however, is to what extent the Urania
(both the withdrawn published version and the manuscript continuation)
circulated amongst seventeenth-century readers. We know that Edward Phillips,
Milton's nephew, reviewed the Urania in his Theatrum Poetarum
Anglicanorum as late as 1675, and that Margaret Cavendish alludes
to the negative response to the Urania in her Sociable Letters
(1664). Gossett provides further evidence for the persisting influence
of the Urania in seventeenth-century literary circles, suggesting
that it remained available for George Manners, earl of Rutland's perusal
in the 1640s and that it "may have served as a source for James Shirley's
Politician, 1641" (xxv). Gossett also addresses lacunas in the
manuscript, suggesting that they may have involved some form of censorship
(perhaps self-censorship). Mueller's sections (4 and 5) add a synopsis
of Wroth's narrative and an evaluation of her style. Mueller's signaling
of Wroth's shift to the second generation of her cast of characters and
their displacement towards Eastern settings should provide fertile ground
for the ongoing assessment of Wroth's relationship to discourses of gender,
class, race, religion, and empire. Finally, Mueller's evaluation of Wroth's
characteristic "trailing sentence form" (xxxiv) as representative of a
favoured early seventeenth-century aristocratic prose style leads her
to affirm "Roberts's decision to present the Urania as an old-spelling
text with modernized punctuation" (xxxvii). Mueller, together with Gossett,
nevertheless reverses Roberts's decision to eliminate Wroth's conspicuous
use of capitalization, arguing that such capitalization is significantly
rhetorical.
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The text of The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania
provides both pleasures and frustrations, not all of which can be dismissed
by acknowledging that Wroth "would not have considered the Urania
manuscript that has come down to us as a finished work" (xxviii). One
of the distinct pleasures of The First Part of the . . . Urania
is its interspersed songs and sonnets, which highlight the possibilities
and costs of female poetic agency. The Second Part is disappointingly
lacking in this compelling oscillation between prose and poetry, perhaps
due to Wroth's practice of inserting such poems during the latter stages
of composition. It remains significant, however, that the poems that do
appear in the Second Part are predominantly by male characters
(one penned by her cousin and lover, William Herbert), when The First
Part of the . . . Urania provided such a rich array of female poetic
voices. Concomitantly, the narratorial voice of the Second Part
rings a new note related to form and content. Whereas The First Part
of the . . .Urania allows the characters' stories to extend beyond
narratorial control in a manner characteristic of Renaissance romance,
the Second Part presents a dominant narratorial voice that presages
the novel form at its most monological. This voice, moreover, presents
a stridently ideological thrust towards proselytizing Christianity that
The First Part of the . . . Urania more ambivalently puts under
erasure. What remains interesting in the Second Part, furthermore,
is how non-Western realms, particularly Tartaria and Persia, are enlisted
for an imperialist mode of Christianity that becomes less certainly based
in Western Europe. This complicated presentation of cultural identity
around the problematic of conversion resonates productively with the mixed
reception of race-gender in The Second Part of the . . . Urania,
which Kim Hall so deftly analyzes in Things of Darkness: Economies
of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Further studies of Wroth's
Urania that place both its parts in dialogue must continue to engage
the multiple discourses of empire informing Wroth's worldview, as well
as the impact her self-consciously gendered perspective has on its rendition.
A detailed consideration of The Second Part of the . . . Urania
will also complicate the emphasis on "constancy" as the locus of women's
virtue (and virtù), as Wroth steadily moves towards a discourse
of "civility" to define her characters, male and female. Again, this shift
indicates that gender and empire are increasingly imbricated in The
Second Part of the . . . Urania, as "civility" becomes the
hallmark of English colonizing efforts in the later seventeenth century.
- Despite these reservations, which reveal my decided preference for The
First Part of the . . . Urania, the recently published Second Part
should become an indispensable resource for students of early modern women's
writing and its relationship to gender and genre, race and empire, conversion
and cartography, and a host of other concerns. Roberts's outline for her
unrealized introductory essay to The Second Part of the . . . Urania,
which she so meticulously edited, provides a judicious agenda for future
studies of Wroth's prose works: "'The Relationship of Parts One and Two
of the Urania,' 'The Empires of the East and West,' 'Baynard's Castle,'
'Music,' 'Reception of the Work'" (xiii). Gossett and Mueller are to be
commended for their scholarly acumen and personal sensitivity in ensuring
that Roberts's profound legacy to early modern women's studies remains productively
open.
