SOURCE: "Mary Wroth's Love's Victory and Pastoral Tragicomedy," in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, edited by Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller, The University of Tennessee Press, 1991, pp. 88-109.

Lewalski provides a brief history of the pastoral tragicomedy and discusses the influence of this tradition in Wroth's Love's Victory.

Mary Wroth's pastoral tragicomedy, Love's Victory, has recently been published for the first and only time; it was unknown except to a small contemporary coterie, and is still virtually unread. Only one complete manuscript is extant, at Penshurst; the Huntington Library has a partial manuscript. Both are holograph. The date of composition is uncertain: Wroth's editors, Josephine Roberts and Michael J. Brennan, suggest the 1620s on the strength of a few parallels to an early section of the unpublished second part of Wroth's Urania, extant only in one manuscript at the Newberry Livrary. We know...