Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and the Grammar of Possibility

A close look at some perplexing grammatical choices in Mary Wroth’s Sonnet 8 provides a route into the complex sentence architecture of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. This essay models a close-reading practice attentive to Wroth’s grammatical experimentation, making use of functional grammar, historical linguistics, and classical rhetoric to help illuminate the multiple affordances of grammatical forms. It also situates its argument about Wroth’s grammatical craft in relation to the gendered cultural history of grammar pedagogy. Wroth’s intertextual poetic dialogue with other Sidney family poets brings this to light, featuring love poems foregrounding the potential mood or representing love in terms of grammar-school lessons. In Wroth’s sonnets of passionate mental deliberation, I examine the poetic work being done by grammatical modality, and especially auxiliary verbs like may, can, must, and shall that are undergoing semantic change in the early modern period. Considering how gendered politics and subjectivity are at work in sonnet syntax, the essay proposes a linguistically oriented approach to extend the developing resources of feminist formalism. [L.M.]