Audiobook · read by volunteers
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus
Lady Mary Wroth (1587–1653)
Read by Elizabeth Klett · 6 chapters · 1 h 43
About the book
Pamphilia loves Amphilanthus, and he does not love only her. The sonnets and songs of this sequence follow the feelings of a woman in love, from the first spark through doubt, jealousy and loneliness to a kind of fierce constancy. Lady Mary Wroth takes the conventions of Elizabethan love poetry and turns them around: here it is the woman who speaks, and the man who is changeable. The poems are intense, musical and sometimes dazzlingly inventive, full of images of night and fire. There are six sections in this recording, all read by one voice, so that you can follow the sequence as a single, unfolding emotional story. It is poetry of passion and self-knowledge from the early seventeenth century. A rare chance to hear the first sonnet sequence by an Englishwoman, in a single voice.
Introduction
Lady Mary Wroth was born around 1587 and died in the early 1650s. She belonged to a famous literary family, as the niece of Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, and she moved in the circle of poets and playwrights at the court of James I. She was friends with Ben Jonson, who dedicated a play to her, and she wrote prose romance as well as poetry.
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus was published in 1621, as a part of her romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. It is the first sonnet sequence written by an Englishwoman. The poems invert the usual pattern of such sequences by making the speaker a woman, Pamphilia, whose name means all-loving, and the beloved a man, Amphilanthus, whose name means lover of two. It is possible that Wroth based the work on her own life. When the book appeared, it caused a scandal at court, and she was criticised for her frankness.
The recording consists of six sections, covering the sonnets and songs in order, and lasts a little under two hours. It is read by a single LibriVox volunteer, Elizabeth Klett. If you enjoy Shakespeare’s sonnets or Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, this will give you a remarkable chance to hear the same tradition from a woman’s perspective.
The sequence is full of images of nature and of the night, and it plays with the rules of the sonnet to express feelings that are sometimes joyful and often painful. Hearing the poems read aloud makes their music clear and shows how carefully they are constructed. It is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in early modern women writers.
Public domain
Lady Mary Wroth died in 1653: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text