Pamphilia to Amphilanthus
[2] The poems are strongly influenced by the sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella (1580) penned by her uncle Sir Philip Sidney.
[3] In Wroth's sequence, she upends Petrarchan tropes by making the unattainable object of love male (as opposed to female).
Wroth began writing sonnets for the sequence as early as 1613, when the poet Josuah Sylvester referred to her poetry in his Lachrimae Lachrimarum.
[4] The seventh sonnet in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus supports Wroth's overarching themes of a woman's struggle in 17th century English society.
Bernadette Andrea's "Pamphilia's Cabinet: Gendered Authorship and Empire in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania" addresses the reasons why a female character would confront the reality of choosing between coercion and consent.
[The following is a misapplication of Mullaney's ideas; or rather, the writer needs to explain how Wroth's work is akin to the ideological functions of the theater which are the actual subject of Mullaney's work]: Stephen Mullaney provides insight into the reason that Mary Wroth's work survived by stating, "What comes to reside in a wonder-cabinet are, in the most reified sense of the phrase, strange things: tokens of alien cultures, reduced to the status of sheer objects, stripped of cultural and human contexts in a way that makes them eminently capable of surviving the period that thus produced them".
Wroth's representation of female emotions conjured with the interaction with of a male suitor puts expected women's values into action.
The sonnet explores the "obedience" attribute of what Bernadette Andrea refers to as the "triple injunction" of English culture in the 17th century.
[6] The "triple injunction" concept was communicated through many different forms including: educational tracts, religious sermons, and legal codes.
It is suggested that the line "Like to the Indians, scorched with the sun" recalls Wroth's role in Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness (1605).
[13] Gary Waller, in his book The Sidney Family Romance, explains that this masque was controversial because Wroth and the other female actors appeared in blackface as the twelve daughters of Niger.
The theme of dark versus light is explored in Sonnet 22 and is representative of her uncertainty of whether she wants her desires for Amphilanthus to be fulfilled or not, because either way will prove "torturous".
The contradiction of allowing women to have "feminine expressive display" of feelings and then strictly "enforced silence" could have represented the good and the bad of courtly life for Wroth.
