"Cloy'd" with Languorous Revisions: Delay and Queer Time in Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus.

This article explores the languorous, queer potential of revision in Lady Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. In Wroth's sonnet collection, Pamphilia uses metaphors of sequential time to describe her experience of being in love with a man. Yet even as she strives towards the romantic resolution of her union with Amphilanthus, Pamphilia finds herself in moments of languor and delay that hold off the movement of sequential time and thus perpetuate her distance from her male beloved. In this experience of languor, Pamphilia finds alternative forms of homoerotic intimacy with an anthropomorphized, female Night. This article explores how the revisions of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus between manuscript and print, and the mise-en-page of Wroth's printed text, perpetuate these languorous and queer delays, holding off the closure of Pamphilia's heteroerotic union. A languorous revision process that defers closure contributes to a queer Petrarchan mode and offers Wroth and her heroine an alternative to the sequential expectations of heteronormative courtship and sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]