The Speaker
The speaker of the poem is Pamphilia, who is the queen of the nation of Pamphilia in The Countess of Montgomery's Urania, the prose romance in which this poem is inserted. Pamphilia is a frequent writer of poetry, and she composes poems to express the secret love she feels for Amphilanthus, the King of Naples. The sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is a series of sonnets and songs written from her perspective about the nature of constant unrequited love, including "It is not love which you poor fools do deem," in which she criticizes other poets for equating an expression of love with performance.
The Beloved
The beloved throughout the sequence of poems from which this one is drawn is Amphilanthus. Pamphilia harbors a secret love for him, despite his philandering. Though he is not explicitly mentioned in the poem itself, he is the object of Pamphilia's affections who inspires her to pen the sonnet sequence in the first place. This dynamic of Lover/Beloved is especially significant for Wroth's text, because it inverts the traditional Petrarchan paradigm of male lover and female beloved. While the Petrarchists of Elizabeth's reign often composed songs and sonnets rife with tropes about the cruel nature of love, Wroth allows her speaker to criticize this conventional portrayal of love in favor of a more genuine expression of emotion.
Poor Fools (other poets)
The "poor fools" addressed by the speaker in the first line of the poem are unspecified, but one can conclude from the allusions to specific poetic tropes that these "fools" are actually Elizabethan poets who wrote before Wroth. These poets—almost exclusively male—were acolytes of Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), an Italian poet of the 14th century known for his consistent representation of love as a cruel and paradoxical experience. In referring to this group of poets (of which William Shakespeare and Wroth's own uncle, Philip Sidney, were a part), Wroth carves out a space for herself as a new kind of love poet in an age when sonnets and sonnet sequence (those forms typically associated with love poetry) were quickly falling out of fashion.
Queen Elizabeth I
Though she isn't referred to in the poem itself, Queen Elizabeth I plays a role in Wroth's sonnet. Elizabeth was on the English throne from 1558 to 1603, and her reign is known for ushering in the English Renaissance, a revival of classical texts and philosophy that led to a burgeoning art world in early modern England. For many of the Petrarchan love poets of the late sixteenth century, Elizabeth was the object of their poetic affection. That is, on top of writing about their unrequited love for their mistresses, these Petrarchists were also writing to gain favor from Elizabeth due to their status as politically involved nobility. Thus, the sonnets of the Petrarchists (which Wroth's poem implicitly criticizes) have often been read as political texts that use love as a metaphor for monarchical favor.
King James I
King James I followed Queen Elizabeth on the throne after her death, and was King of England during the time Wroth wrote Urania. Because Wroth engages so frequently with the forms and themes of the Elizabethan Petrarchists, many have posited that her own poems are politically engaged. Part of the prominent Sidney circle, Wroth would have been highly involved at court and it is possible that her poetry speaks to this often precarious social position: by criticizing the Petrarchists, Wroth perhaps suggests that flattery of the monarch is a selfish pursuit rather than one made for the good of the state.
