Mary Wroth and Shakespeare

<p>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.</p> <p>Introduction <em>Paul Salzman and Marion Wynne-Davies </em><strong>Part 1: Poetry, Circulation, Influence </strong>1. Sugared Sonnets among their Private Friends: Mary Wroth and William Shakespeare <i>Ilona Bell </i>2. Escaping the Void: Isolation, Mutuality and Community in the Sonnets of Wroth and Shakespeare <i>Clare R. Kinney </i>3. Autumn 1604 – documentation and literary coincidence <i>Penny McCarthy </i>4. Mary Wroth and William Shakespeare: A Conversation in Sonnets <em>Gayle Gaskill </em><strong>Part 2: Genre and Gender </strong>5. Absent Fathers: Mary Wroth’s <i>Love’s Victory </i>and William Shakespeare’s <i>King Lear Marion Wynne-Davies </i>6. Wroth's <em>Love Victory </em>as a Response to Shakespeare's Representation of Gender Distinctions: with Special Reference to <em>Romeo and Juliet Akiko Kusunoki </em>7. Four Weddings, Two Funerals and Tragicomic Resurrection: <i>Love's Victory </i>and <i>Much Ado About Nothing</i> <i>Alison Findlay </i>8. Civility and Extravagance in <em>Timon of Athens </em>and <em>Urania Amelia Zurcher </em><strong>Part 3: Querying Identity </strong>9. Rosalind and Wroth: Tyranny and Domination <em>Paul J. Hecht </em>10. <i>Love’s Victory</i>, Pastoral, Gender, and <i>As You Like It</i> <i>Paul Salzman </i>11. As She Likes It: Same-Sex Friendship and Romantic Love in Wroth and Shakespeare <em>Naomi J Miller </em>Afterword <i>Mary Ellen Lamb</i></p>