Monarchy, Marriage, and Katherine Philips’s Female Amicitia

Abstract

This essay argues that Katherine Philips’s female friendship most fully embodies Ciceronian amicitia perfecta, paradoxically because it is constrained by divided duties to marriage, sovereignty, and friendship while resisting the tyranny of classical misogynist friendship discourse. Tracing an unrecognized continuity between Philips’s Interregnum royalist poetry and her post-Restoration drama, the essay centers on three related claims. First, it examines Philips’s theoretical defense of female friendship against what she calls the “tyranny” of male authors who deny women’s capacity for true amicitia. Second, it traces the reallocation of blame in her “apostasy” writings from the early 1650s to the 1660s, moving from the female friend’s apparent desertion to the claims of conjugal despotism personified in the despotic husband. Third, it turns to Cornelia, Pompey’s widow, whose embodiment of republican amicitia in Philips’s translation of Corneille’s Pompey reveals how female constancy rises above wifely vengeance to resist and rebuke Caesar’s tyranny. Instead of treating Philips’s royalist friendship lyrics and Pompey as separate phases in Philips’s career, this reading demonstrates that she sustains her amicitia claims throughout the internalized civil wars of her personal and political upheavals during the Interregnum and the Restoration. By placing the neglected Cornelia in dialogue with Ciceronian republicanism and Philips’s royalist verse, the essay reveals how Philips transforms female friendship into a testing ground for virtue, resistance, and the limits of loyalty itself.