Mary Wroth and Shakespeare

Over the last twenty five years, scholarship on Early Modern women writers has produced editions and criticisms, both on various groups and individual authors. The work on Mary Wroth has been particularly impressive at integrating her poetry, prose and drama into the canon. This in turn has led to comparative studies that link Wroth to a number of male and female writers, including of course, William Shakespeare. At the same time no single volume has attempted a comprehensive comparative analysis. This book sets out to explore the ways in which Wroth negotiated the discourses that are embedded in the Shakespearean canon in order to develop an understanding of her oeuvre based, not on influence and imitation, but on difference, originality and innovation.

Introduction Paul Salzman and Marion Wynne-Davies Part 1: Poetry, Circulation, Influence 1. Sugared Sonnets among their Private Friends: Mary Wroth and William ShakespeareIlona Bell 2. Escaping the Void: Isolation, Mutuality and Community in the Sonnets of Wroth and Shakespeare Clare R. Kinney 3. Autumn 1604 – documentation and literary coincidence Penny McCarthy 4. Mary Wroth and William Shakespeare: A Conversation in Sonnets Gayle Gaskill Part 2: Genre and Gender5.Absent Fathers: Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory and William Shakespeare’s King Lear Marion Wynne-Davies6. Wroth'sLove Victory as a Response to Shakespeare's Representation of Gender Distinctions: with SpecialReference to Romeo and Juliet Akiko Kusunoki 7. Four Weddings, Two Funerals and Tragicomic Resurrection: Love's Victory and Much Ado About Nothing Alison Findlay8. Civility and Extravagance in Timon of Athens and Urania Amelia Zurcher Part 3: Querying Identity 9. Rosalind and Wroth: Tyranny and Domination Paul J. Hecht 10. Love’s Victory, Pastoral, Gender, and As You Like It Paul Salzman11. As She Likes It: Same-Sex Friendship and Romantic Love in Wroth and Shakespeare Naomi J Miller Afterword Mary Ellen Lamb

Paul Salzman is a Professor of English literature at La Trobe University, Australia. He has published extensively on early modern women’s writing, including the monograph Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (2006). He has recently completed an on-line edition of Mary Wroth’s poetry (http://wroth.latrobe.edu.au/) and is now working on an on-line edition of Love’s Victory and a book on literature and politics in the 1620s.Marion Wynne-Davies holds the Chair of English Literature in the Department of English at the University of Surrey, UK. Her main areas of interest are Early Modern literature and women’s writing. She has published two editions of primary material, Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents (1995) and Women Poets of the Renaissance (1998), as well as several collections of essays in the same field. She has published four monographs, Women and Arthurian Literature (1996), Sidney to Milton (2002), Women Writers of the English Renaissance: Familial Discourse (2007) and Margaret Atwood (2010); the next book, Memorialising Early Modern Women Writers will be published in 2014.