Perhaps the most explicit influence on Wroth's work was her uncle, Sir Philip Sidney, who served as a political counselor and soldier under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in the late sixteenth century, and who was also a famous poet. Sidney was and continued to be celebrated as an exemplar of chivalry, nobility, and dedication to one's country, and one will find frequent allusions to his work and military exploits well into the seventeenth century.
This familial legacy is crucial for reading Wroth's poetry, as she directly invokes her uncle and his work (both as a counselor and as a poet) throughout her text. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, Sidney's lengthy prose romance composed in the 1580's, is the obvious precursor to Wroth's The Countess of Montgomery's Urania of 1620. Within this larger text, Wroth also calls upon her uncle's other major work, the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella that circulated in manuscript during Sidney's time. It is clear that, in writing Urania and attaching to it its own lengthy sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Wroth sought to foster an unmistakable identity for herself as niece to one of England's most celebrated heroes.
However, this connection goes beyond the desire for poetic acclaim. While Sidney was, after his untimely death, celebrated for his service to his country, his political involvement was not always so stable. In the months before sitting down to write the Arcadia at his sister's home in Wilton, Sidney had penned a letter to Queen Elizabeth urging her not to marry for the sake of the country. The letter angered Elizabeth, and Sidney was dismissed from court. In the few years that followed his relative exile, Sidney composed the Arcadia, what most know as a prose romance written to entertain his sister and her friends but what critics now know as one of the most tactfully crafted political critiques of the Renaissance. In it, Sidney uses the characters of princes and princesses to question the role of kingship more broadly and to question whether absolute monarchy is the most effective form of government for a people. Weaving scathing political treatises into the framework of a pastoral landscape, Sidney was able to question the validity of the monarchy while maintaining plausible deniability that the text was, in the end, simply meant to entertain.
Mary Wroth's deliberate aligning of herself not only with her uncle but with his political text, then, suggests a second reading of both Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus that wades into the political sphere. While perhaps not so closely aligned with James as Sidney was with Elizabeth (largely due to her status as a woman), Wroth was still of the prominent Sidney circle and an avid participant in courtly goings-on. Having danced in a number of masques at court, Wroth too was clearly interested in cultivating a courtly persona for herself. While critics can only speculate about the role she may have envisioned for herself in James's England, her punishing debt after the death of her husband would have feasibly inspired a need for a relationship with James and Queen Anne. It is not certain this was the case, but regardless, Wroth's use of her uncle's form, genre, and titles cannot be discounted in considering her potential political commentary in Urania.
