Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is a sonnet sequence by the English Renaissance poet Lady Mary Wroth, first published as part of The Countess of Montgomery's Urania in 1621, but subsequently published separately. It is the second known sonnet sequence by a woman writer in England (the first was by Anne Locke). The poems are strongly influenced by the sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella (1580) penned by her uncle Sir Philip Sidney. Like Sidney's sequence, Wroth's sonnets passed among her friends and acquaintances in manuscript form before they were published in 1621. In Wroth's sequence, she upends Petrarchan tropes by making the unattainable object of love male.

Wroth began writing sonnets for the sequence as early as 1613, when the poet Josuah Sylvester referred to her poetry in his Lachrimae Lachrimarum. She composed, in total, 105 sonnets.

Parts of the sequence appear in four versions: in the 1621 The Countess of Montgomeries Urania, the manuscript continuation of Urania, and Wroth's holograph manuscript held at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Nineteen sonnets are spread throughout the prose of the 1621 Urania, and eighty-three are printed in sequence at the back of the same volume. Three sonnets appear in the manuscript continuation of Urania. The holograph manuscript is the most comprehensive collection of the sequence. Five sonnets and one song in the Folger manuscript were not printed in the 1621 volume, while the fourth sonnet in the published sequence does not appear in the manuscript. Dramatic differences between versions consist of changes to punctuation in the 1621 version from that which appears in the manuscript; these changes were probably completed by Urania's printer Augustine Matthews.

The sonnet sequence is organized in four sections. In the first, fifty-five-poem section, Pamphilia determines her true feelings about her unfaithful lover, toward whom she is ambivalent throughout this section, though she affirms her choice to love Amphilanthus by its end. After a series of songs, the next section, of ten poems, takes on a darker tone as Pamphilia confronts doubt and jealously, but the end of the sequence finds her seeking forgiveness from Cupid, the god of love, to whom she promises a crown of sonnets as penance for her doubt. The crown's fourteen sonnets form the sequence's third section. The final eight sonnets in the sequence comprise the fourth section, in which Pamphilia returns to a darker, melancholy tone, but understands that her suffering is necessary in order to understand the inner world of human emotion.

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