Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560-1621: The Politics of Absence (Early Modern Literature in History)

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621 The Politics of Absence

Rosalind Smith

Early Modern Literature in History General Editors: Cedric C. Brown, Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Reading; Andrew Hadfield, Professor of English, University of Sussex, Brighton Advisory Board: Donna Hamilton, University of Maryland; Jean Howard, University of Columbia; John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge; Richard McCoy, CUNY; Sharon Achinstein, University of Oxford Within the period 1520–1740 this series discusses many kinds of writing, both within and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theoretical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures. Titles include: Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti (editors) TEXTS AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Martin Butler (editor) RE-PRESENTING BEN JONSON Text, History, Performance Jocelyn Catty WRITING RAPE, WRITING WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Unbridled Speech Dermot Cavanagh LANGUAGE AND POLITICS IN THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY HISTORY PLAY Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (editors) ‘THIS DOUBLE VOICE’ Gendered Writing in Early Modern England James Daybell (editor) EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S LETTER-WRITING, 1450–1700 Jerome De Groot ROYALIST IDENTITIES John Dolan POETIC OCCASION FROM MILTON TO WORDSWORTH Henk Dragstra, Sheila Ottway and Helen Wilcox (editors) BETRAYING OUR SELVES Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts Sarah M. Dunnigan EROS AND POETRY AT THE COURTS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS AND JAMES VI Andrew Hadfield SHAKESPEARE, SPENSER AND THE MATTER OF BRITAIN William M. Hamlin TRAGEDY AND SCEPTICISM IN SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND

Elizabeth Heale AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND AUTHORSHIP IN RENAISSANCE VERSE Chronicles of the Self Pauline Kiernan STAGING SHAKESPEARE AT THE NEW GLOBE Ronald Knowles (editor) SHAKESPEARE AND CARNIVAL After Bakhtin Arthur F. Marotti (editor) CATHOLICISM AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH TEXTS Jennifer Richards (editor) EARLY MODERN CIVIL DISCOURSES Sasha Roberts READING SHAKESPEARE’S POEMS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Rosalind Smith SONNETS AND THE ENGLISH WOMAN WRITER, 1560–1621 The Politics of Absence Mark Thornton Burnett CONSTRUCTING ‘MONSTERS’ IN SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE MASTERS AND SERVANTS IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE DRAMA AND CULTURE Authority and Obedience The series Early Modern Literature in History is published in association with the Renaissance Texts Research Centre at the University of Reading.

Early Modern Literature in History Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71472–5 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621 The Politics of Absence Rosalind Smith

ª Rosalind Smith 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillanfi is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978
1
4039
9122
5 ISBN-10: 1
4039
9122
7 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smith, Rosalind, 1968
Sonnets and the English woman writer, 1560
1621 : the politics of absence / Rosalind Smith. p. cm.  (Early modern literature in history) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1
4039
9122
7 (cloth) 1. Sonnets, EnglishHistory and criticism. 2. English poetryWomen authorsHistory and criticism. 3. English poetryEarly modern, 1500
1700History and criticism. 4. Women and literature Great BritainHistory16th century. 5. Women and literature Great BritainHistory17th century. 6. PoetryAuthorshipSex differencesHistory16th century. 7. PoetryAuthorshipSex differencesHistory17th century. I. Title. II. Early modern literature in history (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm)) PR509.S7S65 2005 8210 .042099287dc22 2004065756 10 14

9 13

8 12

7 11

6 10

5 09

4 08

3 2 07 06

1 05

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Mark, Felix and Isobel

This page intentionally left blank

Contents Preface

viii

List of Abbreviations

xii

Introduction: Gender, Genre and Attribution in Early Modern Women’s Sonnet Sequences and Collections 1

2

‘In a mirrour clere’: Anne Lock’s Miserere mei Deus as Admonitory Protestantism Attribution and agency in early modern women’s writing: The case of the Meditation The politics of dedication and circulation Out-troping Wyatt

1 13 15 26 31

Generating Absence: The Sonnets of Mary Stuart The casket sonnets: Attribution, circulation and sovereign textuality The politics of absence: The casket sonnets and the feminine erotic lyric The devotional sonnets

39

3

The Politics of Prosopopoeia: The Pandora Sonnets The Pandora sonnets: Translations from Desportes Ventriloquizing Elizabeth I The politics of prosopopoeia

61 65 72 79

4

The Politics of Withdrawal: Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and Lindamira’s Complaint ‘Bard . . . of Light’: Spenserian negotiations in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus ‘I thus goe arm’d to field’: Lindamira’s Complaint

40 46 55

88 92 109

Conclusion

119

Notes

123

Bibliography

145

Index

165 vii

Preface This book examines why English women writers contributed to a central Renaissance lyric form, the sonnet sequence, in such small numbers and at such odd times in the development of the genre. It might seem perverse to concentrate upon absence rather than presence at this stage of research in the field of early modern women’s literary history, especially given the wealth of new writing uncovered in recent feminist scholarship. However, this book uses the example of this single, idiosyncratic genre for two purposes. First, it aims to denaturalize any general assumption of women’s absence or exclusion from particular modes of writing in the period. Such instances of absence do not constitute natural examples of feminine limitation that can pass unremarked, but phenomena themselves that might be examined, questioned and analyzed. Second, the study highlights the surprisingly significant consequences arising from the operation of such unexamined assumptions of absence in the field of early modern women’s writing. Taken collectively for the first time, the texts under examination here are shown to radically change the shape of early modern women’s writing in England. Their history shows moments of startling innovation, agency and possibility, as well as a single instance of textual circulation that may have effectively closed down women’s secular lyric activity in print for fifty years. This book argues that this instance – the casket sonnets attributed to Mary Queen of Scots and widely circulated in print as Protestant propaganda from 1571 – involved a scandalous narrative of rape and adulterous love that made the genres of the sonnet sequence and female complaint unavailable to English women writers in print until Mary Wroth’s unfashionably late 1621 sequences in the Urania. This specific and local instance of textual circulation worked with a set of cultural prescriptions surrounding women’s conduct to preclude women’s participation in the genre at its height in the late Elizabethan period. This book therefore challenges the critical commonplace that the gender encodings of the genre of the Petrarchan sonnet themselves limited or prevented women’s use of the genre. It does so by highlighting the ways in which women in England practised the genre before the publication of the casket sonnets and in their wake, and by comparing the English tradition to a surprisingly prolific Continental tradition of women’s sonnet writing in the Italian and French Renaissances. In line viii

Preface ix

with much recent work on women’s writing in the field of early modern studies, this book also challenges the idea that when women writers used the genre, they did so in ways essentially or predictably different to the practice of their male counterparts. Gender does make differences here to women’s practice within the genre, but these are not differences that always manifest themselves in the same ways – especially not through a consistent interest in the ‘private’ emotional or domestic concerns that have been argued in the past. The study’s concentration on the particular conditions of production, circulation and reception of these sequences seeks to illuminate a more complex understanding of the way in which gender and genre intersect in the period. In different ways, these texts all operated as political interventions underwritten by Protestantism; but what Protestantism meant in each of these contexts, and the agency that it afforded or denied women authors and constructions of women’s writing, differs radically in each literary history traced here. An early reader of this material commented that she could not see how anyone could make an argument from such a strange collection of poetry. In this respect, this book is the product of its critical generation, which favours the obscure over the canonical: neglected poetic coteries; once overlooked genres such as the newsbook, pamphlet, or sermon; and marginal practitioners such as the pornographers of the Elizabethan lyric. But there is a sense that the material examined here is at the far reaches of this literary marginality. This is in part because the texts appear in anomalous circumstances, where an early history of secular lyric agency and innovation in the genres of sonnet and complaint is almost immediately foreclosed. These early conventions of sonnet and complaint, never repeated in the history of the Elizabethan lyric, remain odd and unfamiliar. But the marginality of many of the texts under consideration here also derives from their status as works of uncertain attribution. Considered neither as a secure part of the canon of women’s writing nor as male-authored texts, their unresolved problems of authorship means that they have remained at the edges of literary history. This book uses the uncertainty surrounding these texts to expose a set of methodological problems and omissions in the field of early modern women’s writing. On one hand, this study argues that questions of attribution matter. It is not enough to make strained and poorly supported ascriptions of authorship to women writers in the hope of falsely bolstering the number and diversity of women’s texts in the period. Contested attributions need detailed and scrupulous attention, and the possibility of male

x

Preface

authorship of texts circulated under women’s signatures needs to be entertained if we are to gain a sense of what might have been historical women’s writing practice in the English Renaissance. On the other hand, this book argues that if an attribution remains unresolved, the text can still be productively analyzed and, in some cases, this analysis may still be undertaken within the field of early modern women’s writing. Indeed, such texts allude to the ghostly presence of an historical woman writer through a set of paratextual signals such as signature and circulation practice, but correspond unpredictably to the originating presence of such a writer. In this process, they illuminate a surprising set of conventions and possibilities surrounding ideas of women’s writing in the early modern period. This study regards female authorship and female writing as separate but related categories, and in doing so attempts to extend the boundaries of what is understood to constitute early modern women’s writing. Further, if the impact of texts of uncertain authorship in this single genre is such as to alter the direction of women’s lyric agency in the period, it raises the question of the impact of other texts of disputed attribution in other genres. How might their consideration alter our understanding of not only women’s textual practice in the period, but early modern writing in general? This work began as a thesis at the University of Oxford, under the exemplary, rigorous and inspiring supervision of David Norbrook. It also benefited in its early stages from the influence of a mentor, colleague and friend, Lorna Hutson, and the input of Terence Cave, Diana Birch and Ros Ballaster. I received a number of grants in this period that allowed me to complete my primary research. I would like to thank Exeter College, the University of Sydney and the Newberry Library for their assistance. My time at Oxford was made infinitely more enjoyable because of my friends there: Scott Ashley, Hannah Betts, Brad Hoylman, Simon Hudson, Margaret Kean, Eleri Larkum, William O’Reilly, Michelle O’Callaghan, Bruce Taylor and Clare Taylor. More recently, colleagues at the University of Newcastle have given me a sustaining level of friendship and support; I would like to thank Hugh Craig, David Boyd, Therese Davis, Tim Dolin, Lucy Dugan, Ivor Indyk, David Matthews, Chris Pollnitz, Imre Salusinszky and especially David Kelly for their collegiality and conversations over the years. But my particular thanks must go to two colleagues and friends who helped me beyond the call of duty in preparing this manuscript for publication: Mark Gauntlett and Dianne Osland. Both interrogated my arguments and improved my writing beyond measure; their own prose styles are models of elegance and clarity, and any infelicities of expression remaining in this book are

Preface xi

my own. I would also like to thank Hugh Lindsay for assisting me with some Latin translations. I am grateful to the University of Newcastle for providing me with crucial periods of research time and grants that allowed me to rewrite my thesis as a book. Finally, my greatest debt is owed to my family. This project would never have been finished as a thesis without the emotional and material support of Marie Lewin, Gwen Smith and Ian Smith, and it became a book only with the support and inspiration of my husband Mark Prince and my beautiful children: Felix, Isobel and our newest addition. Without you, ‘my wordes be but wind’. I am grateful to the librarians of the British Library and the Bodleian Library for permission to reprint material from manuscript sources. I would also like to thank Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke for including an earlier version of Chapter 1 in ‘This Double Voice’: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). A section of Chapter 3 appeared in ‘The Sonnets of the Countess of Oxford and Elizabeth I: Translations from Desportes’, Notes and Queries 239 (1994): 446–50. Earlier versions of two sections of Chapter 4 have also appeared in print: ‘Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: The Politics of Withdrawal’, ELR 30:3 (2000): 408–31; and ‘ ‘‘I thus goe arm’d to field’’: Lindamira’s Complaint’, Meridian 18:1 (2001): 73–85. I am grateful to the editors and to the publishers of these works for permission to publish revised versions of this material in this book.

List of Abbreviations ANQ BL ELH ELR Geneva Bible

JWCI NLH NQ PRO SEL

American Notes and Queries British Library English Literary History English Literary Renaissance The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, intro. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). Unless otherwise stated, all biblical references are to this edition. Journal of the Warburg and Cortauld Institutes New Literary History Notes and Queries Public Record Office Studies in English Literature

Where possible, the texts of the poetry and letters reproduced here are all based on original manuscript sources, or early modern print sources when no manuscript source is extant. Punctuation and orthography are derived from the original source with minimal modernization, except for the long /s/ and the expansion of the abbreviated superscript /t/ and other contractions. There has been no normalization of /u/, /v/, /w/ and /i/, /j/, and Lowland Scots terminology such as ‘quhilk’ has not been translated. Omissions of words and lines are indicated in square brackets. Publishers have been given for texts published after 1800.

xii

Introduction: Gender, Genre and Attribution in Early Modern Women’s Sonnet Sequences and Collections

For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of a song or sonnet. – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own1 Virginia Woolf’s influential construction of the Renaissance woman writer as silent, isolated and embattled has undergone significant revision in feminist literary scholarship. The historical sources of such assumptions have been exposed in analyses of canon formation, and a new set of texts, genres and modes of writing has been introduced to accommodate early modern women’s diverse contributions to the literary field.2 However, in the process of redrawing the boundaries of early modern textuality, the ‘perennial puzzle’ that Woolf identifies has remained unexamined: Why did women contribute to some of the vernacular lyric traditions of the English Renaissance in such small numbers? This book reconsiders this question in one of the period’s primary lyric genres, the sonnet sequence. Structured around the detailed local histories of each text’s production and circulation, it seeks to construct a generic history that accommodates rupture and hiatus without recourse to assumed absence, invented tradition or uncritical reinforcement of the male-authored tradition as normative. The scarcity of English women sonneteers at the height of the male-authored genre presents a problem, or puzzle, for examination rather than a straightforward example of feminine limitation in the period. This study argues that the peculiar conditions of circulation, reception, prosopopoeia and politics attached to these sequences changed the shape of early modern English women’s textuality, and it demonstrates the importance of attending to specific generic histories in the study of early modern women’s writing. 1

2

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

Only five sequences and collections were published in England under the signatures of women between 1560 and 1621, and at least two of these are of very doubtful attribution. The first sonnet sequence in English, published in 1560, has been attributed to Anne Lock, and was followed in 1571 by probably the most widely circulated example of poetry under a feminine signature in the period – the casket sonnets – attributed in the text to Mary Queen of Scots and published in George Buchanan’s multiply reprinted Ane Detectiovn.3 The success of this scandalous text as Protestant propaganda marked a hiatus in sonnet sequences attributed to women. With the exception of a sequence misleadingly attributed in the text of Pandora to the Countess of Oxford, Anne Cecil de Vere, in 1584, no further sequences were circulated under feminine signatures until Lady Mary Wroth’s unfashionably late Jacobean sequences published in the Urania in 1621.4 This idiosyncratic history challenges simplistic claims of women’s exclusion from the genre, and raises larger questions about the ways in which the related concepts of gender, genre and textuality might be constructed in the period. The generic shape formed by this set of texts is an unfamiliar one, especially compared to the existing narrative of the development of the sonnet sequence in the English Renaissance, beginning with the forms provided by Wyatt’s and Surrey’s Petrarchan imitations and culminating in the multitude of sequences published in the 1590s.5 It also differs from the sometimes prolific and self-reflexive European traditions of women’s sonnet writing. Clustered at either end of the development of the genre, and marked by a remarkable absence at its height, English early modern women’s sonnet sequences appear at first to be a collection of anomalous exceptions. The idiosyncratic form of the English tradition is highlighted by its comparison with a European tradition, in which women writers in Italy and France published widely circulated sequences participating in and modifying Petrarchan conventions. In Italy especially, the period from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the closing of the Council of Trent in 1563 was one of significant expansion for women writers. Rinaldina Russell claims that between 1538 and the end of the sixteenth century, over 200 books contained examples of feminine authorship: either authored by women, anthologies of women’s writing, or general anthologies that included contributions by women. Similarly, Laura Anna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie list 105 published women poets active in the sixteenth century alone in addition to the 19 whose works they anthologize.6 The best known of these poets, Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara and Gaspara Stampa, all composed substantial

Introduction 3

sonnet sequences. Vittoria Colonna’s first published poem in 1535 was a sonnet, ‘Ahi quanto fu al mio sol contrario il fato’, followed by editions of her poems containing erotic and divine sonnet sequences and collections in 1538, 1544, 1558 and 1559.7 Although the love sonnets of Veronica Gambara’s Rime were uncollected at her death in 1550, they were circulated in manuscript and appeared in many sixteenth-century collections of poetry.8 Both were eclipsed, however, by the posthumous output of Gaspara Stampa: after her death in 1553 her sister Cassandra published her Rime, containing over 221 sonnets in her Rime Amore and 62 in her Rime Varie.9 The Petrarchan sonnet was a form widely used by the many women poets of the Italian Renaissance, and recent scholarship has identified a set of other important practitioners of the form, including Laura Battiferri, Olimpia Malipiera, Tullia d’Aragona, Chiara Matraini, Laura Bacio Terracina, Isabella di Morra and Isabella Andreini.10 The Italian tradition of women’s sonnet writing was a self-reflexive one through which women registered in poems, written or dedicated to one another, their debts and connections in a complex and vibrant feminine literary economy grounded in Petrarchism.11 This tradition of women writing secular lyric poetry arose from a cultural context distinct in many ways from that operating in the corresponding period in England. It encompassed a number of earlier women writers, from the fourteenth-century poets Leonora della Genga, Ortensia di Guglielmo, Livia del Chiavello and Giustina Levi Perotti to a set of humanist writers of the fifteenth century. Writing predominantly in Latin and Greek, humanist scholars such as Battista Malatesta, Laura Cereta, Cassandra Fedele and Ginevra and Isotta Nogarola indirectly provided role models for later generations of women writers, and their influence was supplemented by the women who wrote poetry in the Tuscan vernacular: Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici and Antonia Giannotti Pulci.12 The humanist education of some royal, patrician and courtly women, which included the Italian vernacular poets Dante and Petrarch, contributed to the concentration of women vernacular poets in the sixteenth century. Women’s lyric agency was also fostered by local court cultures in which aristocratic women had a new status as patrons of the arts, whether as members of ruling families or separately: three widows of rulers, Giulia Gonzaga at Mantua, Veronica Gambara at Correggio, and Vittoria Colonna at Pescara, used their independent positions as rulers to foster cultural centres at their courts.13 The status associated with women’s literary education in Italy extended to the cortegiane honorate, whose humanist education included training in the composition of vernacular poetry.

4

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

Mediated through the writing of Cardinal Pietro Bembo, the conventions of the Petrarchan tradition were not only available to a range of women writers in the Italian Renaissance, but also became one of the foundations of their education and, for some, a marker of their virtuosity. On a smaller scale, women writers of the French Renaissance also participated in the genre of the sonnet sequence, or drew upon the conventions and forms of Petrarchism in other lyric genres. Louise Labe´ published her Oeuvres Poe´tiques in 1555, containing a dedicatory epistle, the prose ‘Debate Between Folly and Love’, three elegies and a 24-sonnet sequence; it was followed by three more editions in 1556, two at Lyon and one at Rouen.14 Lyon’s position as a trade crossroads, as the staging area for successive French military invasions of northern Italy, and as a printing and publishing centre meant that it was closer to Italian Renaissance influence than other areas of France.15 As in parts of Italy, a humanist education was increasingly available to wealthy women, and coupled with the appearance in print of the works of Christine de Pisan and Marguerite de Navarre, this milieu also produced the generically diverse Les Rymes by Pernette du Guillet, first published in 1545, and rapidly republished with expansions in Paris in 1546 and 1547 and again in Lyon in 1552.16 In Poitiers, Madeleine and Catherine des Roches published sonnets as part of their collected works Les Oeuvres in 1578, followed by a second edition in 1579 containing additional pieces including Catherine des Roches’ ‘Sonnets de Sincero et Charite’; Les Missives were published in 1586 and Les Secondes Oeuvres in 1583.17 While these examples do not compare with the number of women writing sonnet sequences in the Italian Renaissance, they nonetheless provide examples of women’s participation in the genre that raise questions about the poverty and untimeliness of women’s sonnet writing in England. The difference between English and Italian women’s sonnet writing is surprising, particularly given that many of the critical responses to individual sonnet sequences within the English tradition have assumed that the gender roles encoded within the genre itself limited or prevented women’s use of the genre. The first group of critics to break from early gynocritical readings of these sequences developed an argument that framed women’s writing in terms of its limitations, in which language itself ‘provided women poets only gaps, silences, the role of other, within male discourse’, and within which women were seen to be ‘struggling into discourse’.18 The male-authored Petrarchan sonnet sequence was seen to be defined by a set of strictly delineated gender roles, in which the male Petrarchan subject formed his erotic,

Introduction 5

textual and political subjectivity against the body of his silenced female beloved, and his desiring gaze reflected back towards himself to construct, according to John Freccero’s analysis, a self-enclosed, idolatrous trinity.19 As Ann Rosalind Jones’ early and nuanced analysis of the poetry of Louise Labe´ and Pernette du Guillet argues, the woman subject did not simply appropriate the male subject position, but wrote ‘within but against the center of the traditions that surrounded them, using Petrarchan and Neoplatonic discourse in revisionary and interrogatory ways’.20 However, in the first analyses of the English sonnet sequences, gender was seen not only to shape but to circumscribe the woman writer’s engagement with the genre, and even to preclude its possibility: Gary Waller goes so far as to argue that the shift from passive object of devotion to active speaking subject was so difficult as to institutionalize ‘a wholesale gagging of women readers and writers’.21 A number of critical analyses of English women’s sonnet sequences followed this approach, characterizing the poetry in terms of circumscription, silence and enclosure and denying the writers all but the most limited textual agency even as their participation in the genre is discussed. It is a curious stance, marked by the uneasy intersection of liberal feminism and early new historicism, which attempts to find a universal marker for the difference of women’s writing within this genre in discourses of containment and control. What is found to be ‘feminine’ or different here are qualities associated with the containment of women within the private sphere. This approach ignored the new historicist rewriting of the male-authored sonnet sequence as a charged political vehicle used by courtiers as a means of advancing their status in the court and asserting a textual authority as they become increasingly disenfranchised from political power. Instead, it was implied that, for women, love was still love; they used the Petrarchan love sequence in a private context.22 The terms ‘women’ and ‘genre’ here formed monolithic categories, overriding differences in class, political status and affiliation attaching to specific women writers and ignoring shifts within the genre itself. The critical problems associated with such readings have been subject to revision since the mid-1990s, and these revisions have focused in particular on the separation of the sequences from the wider genre of the male-authored sonnet sequence and from courtly or political concerns. Heather DuBrow’s Echoes of Desire addresses the new historicist tendency to read Petrarchism as an exercise in domination and silencing, arguing that Arthur Marotti’s corrective formulation against reading love as love in the genre has been taken too far. In this reading, the figure of Laura is more than a decoy enabling the speaker’s political

6

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

ambitions, but instead becomes a site of confusion of gender and reinterpretation of speech and silence. The male-authored sequence is no longer understood as an empowered masculine subjectivity constructed against a silenced feminine object, but as a more contingent and volatile space for the unresolved ‘tossing back and forth between representations of success and failure, agency and impotence, and control and helplessness’.23 The destabilized subject position of the Petrarchan speaker afforded by this model is one balanced by a construction of the feminine beloved in terms more complex than silence and objectification; the female voice is subject within the genre to a number of modes, including reported and direct speech, praise and challenge, in forms of aestheticization that do not always equate with ‘objectification and diminution’.24 A similar critique is offered by Barbara Estrin, where the Petrarchan poem becomes a ‘disputed space’ with ‘overlapping counter-voices’ and where a woman may be ‘sometimes the ‘‘subject of consciousness’’ ’.25 These reconsiderations of the dynamics of Petrarchism challenge earlier formulations of the English genre in terms of reductive and distinct gender encoding, with significant ramifications for work in early modern women’s poetry. DuBrow’s call for a historicized used of psychoanalytical modes of differentiation has been mirrored in other, more recent analyses, which attend to the complexity and historical specificity of individual sequences. In particular, the sequences at the beginning and the end of the English tradition, attributed to Anne Lock and Lady Mary Wroth, have been reconsidered as engagements with local and political Protestantism, although keyed to very different moments in its development. In this process, the sequences have been aligned with, rather than automatically precluded from, contemporary male-authored literary groupings.26 Yet these new readings are not without their problems. The focus upon local contexts reflects a desire to avoid essentialist generalizations and to attend to specific histories, but has tended to mask any connections within women’s textual practice that might fall outside immediate familial, social and literary networks. The generic field remains characterized by disconnection and anomalous exceptions. Even recent approaches to early modern women’s writing through genre assume an absence of specific feminine generic traditions outside the feminineencoded genres of letters, diaries and life writing. Instead, they address the broad category of early modern women’s engagement with Petrarchism rather than their participation in specific genres such as the sonnet sequence or complaint.27 In addition, this narrative of anomaly is reinforced by uncertainties of authorship attaching to the genre of the

Introduction 7

sonnet sequence: with the exception of the two sequences published by Lady Mary Wroth in the Urania, all of these sequences are troubled by questions of attribution. Especially in the most problematic cases of the sonnets attributed, in print, to Mary Queen of Scots and Anne Cecil de Vere, the uncertainty of their authorship has left these texts at the edges of literary history. Neither women’s writing nor canonical male-authored texts, they have either been considered only in terms of their attribution, often on unconvincingly partisan grounds, or been excluded from discussion altogether. Yet by virtue of their circulation as texts under women’s signatures, they impacted upon the shape of the genre and women’s agency within it in significant and surprising ways. Their reconsideration here not only alters local formations of gender and genre, but raises larger questions about the current methodologies underpinning the category of women’s writing itself. This book has three aims. For the first time, it examines as a whole the genre of sonnet sequences and collections written by and attributed to women in the English Renaissance. It maps an unfamiliar generic history that runs parallel to the male-authored tradition, but inverts its trajectory. The female-authored genre is characterized by moments of innovation and agency in the mid-sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century, but is almost entirely absent in the late Elizabethan period, when, as Woolf remarks, ‘every other man, it seemed, was capable of a song or sonnet’. The book’s first aim is to construct a map of the genre, and to explore the cultural and social factors that shaped this unusual history. These include an examination of the ways in which the publication of these sequences impacted upon each another, and upon women’s lyric agency in the period. The second aim of the book is to reconsider the individual sequences in the particular historical contexts of their production and circulation. These local studies address questions of attribution, political agency and critical reception: they aim to provide a detailed analysis of the differences that discourses of gender actually made to each of these texts at particular historical moments. In this process, they resist generalized claims about the operation of gender and genre in the period in favour of a specific, constantly shifting narrative of different forms of ‘feminine’ textual practice. Finally, the third aim of the book is to interrogate the ways in which women’s writing is defined in the period. The attribution difficulties surrounding many of these sequences raise questions about a set of unexamined critical assumptions that give legitimacy to those texts securely identified with historical women writers, yet ignore others of less certain provenance. The book highlights, through the example of a single genre, the problems that such simplistic

8

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

constructions of author, text and signature create, and suggests that our understanding of the field of early modern women’s writing might be entirely different if such problematic texts were admitted. In examining the curious genre of sonnet sequences and collections written by and attributed to women in the English Renaissance as a whole, this book first argues for a specifically feminine, and increasingly self-reflexive, generic practice, one characterized by moments of extraordinary innovation and possibility as well as rupture and difficulty. The comparative examples of women’s sonnet sequences in Italy and France, together with recent reformulations of the encodings of gender within the genre, suggest that the idiosyncratic formation of the English tradition cannot be attributed to the dynamics of the genre alone. This book proposes a more complex set of forces at work to produce the shape of the English tradition, attributable in part to the discourses surrounding women and secular writing at particular historical instances in the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts and in part to the circulation histories of the particular poems under consideration. While the book employs a historical specificity in its analysis of the politics of individual texts and its focus on a single genre, it also suggests that examples of individual textual practice circulated under feminine signatures had an impact on a wider literary field than that contained by immediate social networks. This impact took a number of forms, by providing precedents for modes of textual circulation or possible generic combinations that enabled the female subject to negotiate certain gender codes. However, the generic history of the sonnet sequence also indicates that such precedents were not always positive or empowering for other women writers. The book argues that the complex and scandalous circulation history of Mary Stuart’s casket sonnets, which detail the female speaker’s rape and continuing adulterous relationship, both opened up a set of textual possibilities for secular women poets and simultaneously closed off the genre to women writers for 50 years. The widespread circulation of the casket sonnets created in part the generic hiatus that has been figured in critical terms as simple absence and exclusion. However, the impact of this sequence worked in conjunction with a complex set of other cultural discourses to inform women’s engagement with the genre. This book secondly attempts to reconstruct the local historical circumstances of each text’s production and circulation, including a detailed attention to questions of authorship and attribution, in order to examine the differences that gender might make in a particular context. Rather than seeing these as texts directed towards a limited audience and predominantly concerned with domestic or emotional interests, the study

Introduction 9

challenges the idea that women did not use the genre of the sonnet sequence as male courtiers did, for political purposes, and it seeks to reposition these sequences and writers in terms of their engagement with courtly and political concerns. Although the terms of their political articulations differ from the sequences circulated under male signatures, these differences are not always consistent, nor attributable to a single model of femininity. They alter according to the class, mobility and access to shifting sites of power of their authors, the way the text is circulated, the investments of its audience and the extent of its political engagement. Neither are they wholly political texts: the practice of combining the Petrarchan sonnet with penitential meditation, elegy and complaint in these sequences constantly mediates and disguises the political within alternative frames, often linked to questions of personal faith, familial concerns or the pursuit of material self-interest. The insertion of the woman subject into the genre of the sonnet sequence becomes a complex process of the negotiation of limits, where the extent of agency shifts according to the local circumstances of a text’s production and circulation. One surprising result of these local analyses is the recurrence of Protestantism as a central discourse variously underwriting the political interventions of each of these texts. The Meditation sequence, attached to Anne Lock’s translation of Calvin’s sermons on Isaiah 38, forms part of a text that uses the twin figures of Hezekiah and David as models of admonitory instruction to the sovereign, seeking to direct religious policy in the early Elizabethan state in response to a Calvinist anxiety concerning Elizabeth’s uncertain religious alliances. The casket sonnets of Mary Stuart were circulated in print from 1571 in George Buchanan’s Ane Detectiovn as Protestant propaganda, immediately positioning their erotic content in a public context and providing a damaging alternative to the chaste poetics of sovereignty practised by Elizabeth I. In a later parallel to the 1560 Meditation sonnets, the examples of prosopopoeia attributed in the text of John Soowthern’s Pandora to Anne Cecil de Vere and Elizabeth I are also informed by a radical Protestant agenda, directed towards Elizabethan reluctance towards military involvement in the Netherlands, with an element of admonitory instruction towards the sovereign. Finally, the sonnet sequences Lindamira’s Complaint and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Lady Mary Wroth are aligned with the writing of the Spenserians, a group of radical Protestant writers in the Jacobean court, and use a Spenserian nostalgia for Elizabeth’s reign both to present a utopian Protestant court and to transfer the multi-valency surrounding the sovereign which characterizes the Elizabethan sonnet sequence to the Jacobean court.

10 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

It is now a critical commonplace to suggest that in England women writers had a Reformation rather than a Renaissance, and that religion enabled a degree of textual agency for women writers in the period.28 Yet these discussions have emphasized women’s participation in forms of religious textual practice such as translation, prayer and meditation rather than their participation in secular genres such as the erotic lyric. The specific histories outlined here modify this argument by demonstrating the role that Protestantism played, in both radical and conservative forms, in the construction of actual and imagined women’s writing in England. The models provided by Pauline psalm meditation in particular, offering a plainant speaking in colloquy to God, provided fruitful correspondences to the relationship of the Petrarchan subject to a distant lover and were repeatedly capitalized upon in these sequences as authorizing strategies producing a decorous secular subjectivity for the ‘woman writer’. They are mirrored by other biblical precedents open to assertions of female lyric agency: particularly that of the female erotic subject speaking to Christ as lover and bridegroom and using the blazon in the Song of Songs.29 An examination of the genre as a whole, however, shows that this is not a simple narrative equating religion with agency: the Protestant political contexts at work here both constructed authorizing strategies for some writers and prevented access to the genre for others. The impact of the casket sonnets within the genre of the sonnet sequence also raises questions as to their influence upon the wider field of secular women’s writing in the English Renaissance. Josephine Roberts’ suggestion that the popularity of mimed female discourse, particularly in the genre of complaint, ‘may well have been a contributing factor in discouraging sixteenth-century Englishwomen from writing their own lyric poetry’ is here given specific force, inviting speculation that the casket sonnets might have contributed to the national bias towards religious writing in contrast to women’s parallel traditions in Europe.30 Capitalizing on the much-rehearsed, but nascent, association between women’s textuality and sexuality, Elizabeth’s early propaganda policies intensified the very discourses they exploited in circulating the details of the speaker’s rape and continuing adultery with her married lover in the casket sonnets. These are familiar elements of the female complaint, another genre only employed by women outside its height in the male-authored tradition: the examples of the Meditation’s plainant David in 1560 and Isabella Whitney’s The Copy of a Letter (1567) and A Sweet Nosgay (1573) again are not repeated until Mary Wroth’s Lindamira’s Complaint in the Urania in 1621. Recovering a specific generic history provides a new perspective on generalized claims of the

Introduction 11

effect of cultural construction of women’s sexuality and textuality in England, associations which operated less restrictively in parallel European contexts and to shifting degrees within an English context itself.31 For the casket sonnets to be effective as propaganda defaming Mary Stuart’s character, they needed to be believable as the work of a woman poet, albeit a foreign one. This indicates a very different set of expectations and assumptions about women’s secular lyric agency operating in the late 1560s and early 1570s compared to the late Elizabethan period. Although recent caveats warn against the duplicities and strains of the construction of feminine literary traditions, this restricted analysis of genre through an examination of local contexts indicates the value of examining such partial and strange traditions for what they might tell us about constructions of both gender and genre in the period. By attending to local literary histories, the book works to recover not just a set of texts, but a forgotten generic tradition. The third aim of this book is thus to examine the processes that led to the genre’s neglect, and to reconsider the boundaries of what might be considered feminine textuality in the early modern period. The uneasy status conferred upon four of these texts by their uncertain attributions leads to the use here of a model of women’s writing articulated in practice and located in the material conventions of textual circulation rather than in the body of the author. These conventions of signature and circulation practice create paratextual signals that might both foreground the role of a woman writer, through a direct textual attribution in print, or occlude her identity, through the use of initials. However, as this collection of histories shows, these strategies correspond unpredictably to the authorial presence of an historical woman writer. Much work has been done in recent scholarship to modify some of our modern assumptions regarding the author to accommodate the writing practices of the Renaissance, which included collaborative and coterie authorship, a range of strategies of anonymity in publication, and unfamiliar constructions of textual ownership and literary indebtedness.32 However, these revisions have only recently been applied to the field of early modern women’s writing, largely because the gynocritical project that has brought almost all of these writers to critical view was concerned with establishing the existence of a body of historical women writers in response to assumptions of their absence or the poverty of their textual activity.33 This project of recovery has led to some strained and at times duplicitous attributions, and has left a large body of texts in a state of indeterminacy and neglect. This study seeks to keep the idea of attribution in play, in order to keep historical women writing subjects in view. But it approaches the necessary

12 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

uncertainties attached to the process of attributing authorship as part of a text’s interpretative context, rather than simply a register of its legitimacy as ‘women’s writing’. A different privilege attached to authenticity, and a different methodology uncoupling the necessary association of the gender of the author and the gender of the text, newly allows the examination of these sonnet sequences as instances of local textual practice and as part of a generic history. Genre looks different here; it becomes a hyperbolized version of the openness which Rosalie Colie identifies as typical of Renaissance writing, and which Lyotard identifies in his flexible and contingent theory of genre as ‘modes of linking’, both dependent upon a set of prior texts and altering at each moment of utterance.34 While offering, in Colie’s terms, ‘a set of interpretations, of ‘‘fixes’’ or ‘‘frames’’ on the world’, genre also offers for these writers both a frame and a site of innovation, a safety net and a familiar language as well as a place for the insertion of the unfamiliar voice of the female Petrarchan subject. This group of texts also destabilizes current constructions of the figure of the early modern woman writer: the literary history uncovered here indicates an early history of secular lyric agency and innovation as well as the later repressive mechanisms of its containment. These shifts are linked to specific, and highly contingent, local circumstances of the production and circulation of texts, which mean that this generic history is shadowed by a set of alternatives that allow for a different trajectory of women’s writing in the English Renaissance, one closer to the more productive histories of feminine secular writing in Italy and France. Without the circulation of the casket sonnets, our understanding of the parameters of feminine textual agency in England might have been very different. While not seeking to re-invoke Jakob Burckhardt’s level playing field, significantly located in the Italian Renaissance, this generic history nonetheless resists the idea that women’s secular textual agency was necessarily limited in England, by examining the specific set of events that produced its particular exclusions and emphases.35 Finally, this generic history, made up of real and imagined women writers, extends the boundaries of what might constitute women’s writing in the early modern period. It is the texts of uncertain attribution that tell us most about constructions of women and writing, gender and genre in this history, and their impact in the study of this single genre suggests that their inclusion in the literary field as a whole might construct a very different sense of what constituted the separate but related categories of early modern female authorship, writing and voice in England.36

1 ‘In a mirrour clere’: Anne Lock’s Miserere mei Deus as Admonitory Protestantism

In 1560, Anne Lock published under her initials a translation of four of Calvin’s sermons on Isaiah 38, prefaced by a dedicatory epistle to Catherine Brandon and followed by a sonnet sequence, A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner: Written in the Maner of a Paraphrase upon the 51. Psalme of David. The Meditation consists of two parts: five sonnets ‘expressing the passioned minde of the penitent sinner’, followed by a longer sequence paraphrasing the 51st Psalm. It is an unsettling text in a number of ways. Generically anomalous, it contains the first sonnet sequence not only to be written in English, but also to combine the Petrarchan genre of sonnet sequence with psalm paraphrase. Unlike the texts of the circle of aristocratic women surrounding Catherine Parr, which form the major precedents for women’s publication in England before 1560, the text was compiled from the community of Protestant exiles in Geneva by a woman from a merchant family. Its strangeness disturbs some of the critical models applied to mid-sixteenth-century women’s writing, models that characterize women’s textual activity in terms of a restricted class of aristocratic authors, in a secondary or derivative relationship to male-authored texts, and generally confined to religious genres and topoi. In contrast to these constructions of early Elizabethan women’s writing, I argue here that the Meditation uses French Calvinist and Anglo-Genevan traditions of psalm paraphrase to surprisingly ambitious ends. The sequence displays a textual virtuosity, expressed as innovative generic combination, which works to out-trope the sonnets and psalm paraphrases of their main poetic predecessor in England, Thomas Wyatt. Further, the text as a whole directs itself to early Elizabethan religious policy by mobilizing the figures of Hezekiah 13

14 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

and David as complementary examples of an ideal Protestant sovereignty, in a bid to exert admonitory pressure upon a new queen whose religious and political alliances appeared uncertain. Recent critical reception of the Meditation has celebrated its innovation as the first English sonnet sequence, but it has been characterized by a reluctance to analyze its anomalous position or to acknowledge its rhetorical ambition. Moreover, this growing body of criticism has engaged only partially with its significant problems of attribution.1 Here I attend to the text’s points of disruption in order to reposition it within the divergent male-authored traditions with which it engages, as well as suggesting a context for its innovation as the deployment of Petrarchism in the pursuit of a specific political purpose: the promotion of Calvinist religious policy in the early Elizabethan state. In contesting much of its recent critical reception as private or explicitly feminine meditation, I argue that the sequence engages in genres, traditions and political projects closely aligned with canonical male-authored Protestant texts, and as such questions an unproblematic separation of men’s and women’s writing in this period.2 If the text is indeed written by Lock, its apparent anomalies challenge the categories by which women’s writing in 1560 might be understood, and suggest that a broader, more flexible and historically specific construction of women’s writing in this period is required to accommodate its diversity. Lock came from a merchant background, the daughter of Stephen Vaughan – himself the son of a London mercer – who was closely connected with Thomas Cromwell and pursued a career in service to the government, acting as a diplomatic agent from 1530 to 1544 and as sole financial agent for the government in Antwerp trade circles from 1544 to 1546.3 Accused of heresy in 1531, he became increasingly aligned with a Protestant position, a shift registered by his choice of second wife: in 1546 he married Margery Brinkelow whose first husband, Henry Brinkelow, wrote two Protestant tracts, The Complaynt of Roderyck Mors and The Lamentacyon of a Christen agaynst the Cytye of London.4 When Vaughan’s daughter Anne married Henry Lock, she married into a milieu very much like that of her upbringing, a prosperous merchant-class family linked to the Tudor court and the promotion of Protestantism. Like her father, her new husband was also a merchant with connections in Antwerp and came from a wealthy family. Anne Lock went on to marry the radical Protestant preacher Edward Dering in 1572, and an Exeter merchant, Richard Prowse, in 1583; under the name Anne Prowse, she published a translation of John Taffin’s Of the Markes of the Children of God in 1590, dedicated to the Countess of Warwick.5

Anne Lock’s Miserere mei Deus 15

Lock was also a friend of John Knox, and a section of their correspondence survives in the form of letters from Knox to Lock between 1556 and 1559, in which Knox urged Lock to join the community of Protestant exiles in Geneva.6 She arrived in Geneva in May 1557 and used as the source for her translation the unpublished sermons on Isaiah preached by Calvin as ‘his ordinary weekday sermons’ from 16 July 1556, recorded in six manuscript volumes by the French refugee Denis Raguenier. Lock must have used as her copytext volume three, consisting of 67 sermons on Isaiah 30–41, given between 4 August and 31 December 1556.7 Her partial English translation of these sermons is their first publication in 1560; they were later published in French by Franc¸oise E´stienne in 1562.8

Attribution and agency in early modern women’s writing: The case of the Meditation Published under the initials A.L., even the translation has only been attributed to Lock on the basis of an inscription in the British Library copy that identifies the book as a gift: ‘Liber Henrici Lock ex dono Annae uxoris suae. 1559.’9 However, the presence of a disclaimer directly before the poetic sections of the text, claiming that the sonnets were ‘delivered me by my frend’, complicates any straightforward attribution of these sections to Lock. The complex attribution questions surrounding the poems are considered in some detail here mainly because many of the critics who have analyzed the sonnets recently have discussed the question of attribution very selectively or simply have taken Lock’s authorship for granted. While a substantial body of evidence for the attribution to Lock exists, it remains troubled by a set of unresolved problems, including the disclaimer and a significant dissimilarity to the other major poem attributed to Lock. Rather than expediently ignoring these attribution difficulties in a bid to recruit the poems to the canon of women’s writing, this study retains the ambiguity of their status in order to raise questions about some of the methodologies at work in early modern women’s writing, especially in relation to questions of anonymity. As Marcy North argues, even the use of initials is anomalous here: surprisingly few early modern women writers used them as a means of disguising their gender and avoiding the stigma of public expression, and she ‘wonders if we would even be discussing the gender of A.L. if it were not for the British Library copy of the Sermons’.10 In keeping open questions of attribution and attending to the different strategies of anonymity employed by this text, this book uses the Meditation as the

16 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

first of a set of examples illuminating current problems in the field of early modern women’s writing. Specifically, I am concerned with the ways in which a restricted definition of women’s writing, necessarily linking the body of an historical author with the text and ignoring any problems with this association, underwrites our understanding of individual texts, genres and the field itself. Following North’s suggestion that we recognize female voice and female authorship as ‘two different conventions that do not always work together’, I begin this exploration of Lock’s Meditation by attending to its status as a female-authored text.11 Not only is the text as a whole published under the initials A.L., which meant that it was not automatically read as women’s writing by a general early modern audience, but its concluding sequences are preceded by a disclaimer of authorship: I haue added this meditation folowyng vnto the ende of this boke, not as a parcell of maister Caluines worke, but for thatit well agreeth with the same argument, and was deliuered me by my frend with whom I knew I might be so bolde to vse & publishe it as pleased me. (Aa1v) The disclaimer raises interpretative problems of its own, and attracts two polarized responses. The first takes the statement at face value and identifies the ‘frend’ who delivered the text as John Knox, while the second expediently ignores the statement in making an uncomplicated attribution of the sequence to Lock. Both readings are problematized by the textual practices of the overlapping manuscript and print cultures in the sixteenth-century court. A literal reading fails to register the statement’s rhetorical status and its place within the culture of the court, where the circulation of a text in print carried marked class implications that a writer might wish to disguise. Theories of the ‘stigma of print’ argue that participation in private coteries of manuscript exchange in the late sixteenth century upheld the boundaries of aristocratic culture against a rising middle class.12 A refusal to circulate texts in print, which was Sidney’s response to the emergent print culture, provided one means of negotiating the stigma of print and its class implications; the disclaimer, or the author’s declaration of ignorance of the text’s circulation in print until after the fact, provided another means of denying the extent of a writer’s participation in print culture. Tottel justifies publication in terms of a nationalistic promotion of the vernacular, associating manuscript circulation with ‘ungentle horders’, while early writers such as Barnabe Googe and Nicholas Grimald assert that they published through the urgings or actions of friends.13 Yet,

Anne Lock’s Miserere mei Deus 17

unlike the assertion in Lock’s text that the sonnets were supplied by a friend, they claim authorship of their texts but minimize their responsibility for circulating them in print. This crucial difference means that the disclaimer in the 1560 text cannot simply be read, in Roland Greene’s terms, as ‘a circumlocution that generates an understanding beyond what it actually says, an acknowledgement that ‘‘I wrote this book.’’ ’14 The presence of a disclaimer at all, in a text written precisely from the emergent middle class against whom the mechanisms of aristocratic manuscript circulation were a protection, is surprising. It raises the possibility that it may have been prompted as much by the gender of the author as her class. Little precedent existed within the English tradition at this point for women’s publication of poetry, apart from Catherine Parr’s two volumes of meditations, the lost text of psalms and proverbs by Lady Elizabeth Fane, and Elizabeth’s meditation on Psalm 13 following her translation of A Godly Meditation of the Soul.15 The 1560 Mediation is indebted to these pieces in a number of ways: Parr’s 1545 text also expands upon a canonical piece of devotional writing as its source, Thomas a` Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, and her 1547 text claims to have been ‘set furth at the instaunt desire’ of Catherine Brandon. Elizabeth’s combination of a translation and a concluding psalm meditation corresponds to the 1560 text’s generic practice, and both texts have strong associations with the Protestant cause. However, the texts by Parr and Elizabeth have access to aristocratic and royal authority unavailable to a woman writer from a merchant background. In this light, the unprecedented status of this text and its author in early print culture might have prompted a disclaimer of authorship.16 The disclaimer might additionally register the text’s aspirations towards a courtly circulation, as signalled by its dedication to Catherine Brandon. That is, the disclaimer might be understood as an attempt to key into the cultural authorization within the court implicit in a reluctance to publish. Wendy Wall has located an impulse in mid-sixteenth-century writers towards a manipulation of the stigma of print as a discourse simultaneously rhetorically reproduced and displaced. In this argument, the preface to Tottel’s Miscellany, in referring to pieces of poetry as ‘parcelles’, kept alive a sense of the circulation of the poems in coterie circles and made visible the stigma of print as paradoxical authorization of their printed circulation. Its encoding operated as a means of finding social as well as literary legitimization.17 Whether a reflection of anxieties related to gender, class or their intersection, the disclaimer remains a sufficiently problematic statement that it cannot be ignored in considering the question of the text’s attribution. However, it operates

18 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

less as a determining factor in establishing attribution than as a register of the unstable site of mid-sixteenth-century attitudes towards modes of textual circulation. Equally problematic are the literal readings of the disclaimer that identify the friend who delivered the text to Lock as John Knox. These are based on the personal relationship of Lock and Knox, and Lock’s role in supplying some of Knox’s work to the publisher John Field in 1583.18 These are highly speculative foundations for the attribution to Knox, and are made even less likely given that his sole publication of poetry consisted of the psalms in The Book of Common Prayer, which correspond so closely to the Sternhold and Hopkins’ Psalter that they are not considered to be Knox’s work. Knox’s Psalms and Liturgy contains 41 Psalms specific to the Scottish edition, but these were written by William Kethe, William Whittingham, John Pulleyn, Robert Pont and I.C., probably the Edinburgh minister John Craig.19 Lock’s text was prepared during her time in Geneva, between mid-1557 and 1559, yet the detailed and consistent correspondence from Knox to Lock in this period makes no mention of the sonnets, although, as Roland Greene points out, Knox does mention the book of ‘Calvine upun Isaie’ as one of the works he needed Lock to send to him.20 Knox’s silence on the matter of the sonnets contrasts with his clear instructions concerning Lock’s communication of the texts of his letters during that period. The current movement towards making an uncomplicated attribution of the sonnets to Lock has been partly generated by the weakness of the case attributing them to Knox, but little more has been offered to offset the problems generated by the disclaimer prefacing the sonnets. The only other argument suggested by critics in support of the attribution to Lock rests with her later publishing history. Lock’s 1590 translation of Jean Taffin’s Des Marques des Enfans de Dieu, dedicated to the Countess of Warwick, is also concluded by a long poem which is not in the copytext of Taffin’s revised third edition published in 1588.21 Lock’s translation does not include Taffin’s two eight-line prefatory poems, nor the poems concluding the thirteenth chapter of meditations.22 The difference between the contents in the Lock’ text and her copytext goes some way towards establishing her authorship of the poems included in her text. But any simple connection between Lock’s authorship of the translation and the text’s concluding poem is problematized by later French and Dutch editions of the text which contain concluding poems inserted by either the translator or the publisher. The first edition of the text in Dutch appeared in 1588 and was followed by a second impression in 1590; both contained Dutch translations of the

Anne Lock’s Miserere mei Deus 19

prefatory and concluding Taffin poems found in the third edition in French. However, in 1597 Taffin released a revised edition of the text in French which kept the same concluding poems but replaced the opening prophetic poems with a sonnet ‘Sur le sujet de ce liure.’23 A translation of the sonnet also appeared one year later in a 1598 Dutch translation of Taffin’s revised fifth edition. Later Dutch editions used a translation of Taffin’s fifth edition by Jacobus Viverius that not only retained a translation of the Taffin sonnet, but also concluded with a long paraphrase of the 119th Psalm in 46 quatrains by Viverius.24 All English editions of Lock’s translation reprinted ‘The necessitie and benefite of Affliction’ as the concluding poem, but a French edition of Taffin’s text published in 1601 contains four unattributed sonnets distinct from any poetic material included by Taffin or his translators in earlier texts and added, according to the publisher, ‘afin que les pages suyvantes ne restassent vuydes’.25 Two important elements in the attribution debate surrounding Lock’s poetic output are indicated here. First, it is clear that the poem concluding Lock’s text, ‘The necessitie and benefite of Affliction’, was not a translation from Taffin’s own poetry in French editions of the text. Secondly, it indicates a tradition in which the translator or editor, as well as the author, supplemented the Taffin text with a concluding poem providing a precedent for Lock in her 1590 version of the text. One publisher’s expedient addition of a sonnet sequence unrelated to Taffin problematizes any straightforward assumption of Lock’s authorship of the poem; however, some further evidence suggesting her authorship can be gained from the fact that Lock had poetic material available to her, which she might have translated, but instead a poem was inserted unrelated to this material. The 1560 sonnet sequence and the 1590 long poem share a thematic and structural similarity: each focuses on an Old Testament figure – David and Job respectively – to dramatize the affliction of the sinner. However, the correspondences between the two pieces do not extend much further. ‘The necessitie and benefite of Affliction’ is in quatrains, with regular iambic rhythms and alternating eight and six syllable lines: Iob lost his friends, he lost his wealth, and comfort of his wife: He lost his children and his health, yea, all but wretched life. The poem’s simplicity contrasts with the more complex rhythmic and metrical structures of the earlier sequence. While the 1560 Meditation

20 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

also uses tropes that are largely simple and structural – consisting mainly of repetition, alliteration and metaphor – they are of a different register to the more subdued language of the later poem, as the second sonnet indicates: So I blinde wretch, whome Gods enflamed ire With pearcing stroke hath throwne unto the grou[n]d, Amidde my sinnes still groueling in the myre, Finde not the way that other oft haue found, Whome cherefull glimse of gods abounding grace Hath oft releued and oft with shyning light Hath brought to ioy out of the vgglye place, Where I in darke of euerlasting night Bewayle my woefull and unhappy case, And fret my dyeing soule with gnawing paine. Yet blinde, alas, I groape about for grace, While blinde for grace I groape about in vaine, My fainting breath I gather vp and straine, Mercie, mercie to crye and crye againe. These stylistic differences might be a function of difference in genre: indeed, it might be that the pressures of the Petrarchan tradition intensify the tropes used in the Protestant plain speech of the earlier sonnet sequence. But there is a significant difference between the dramatized and internalized dilation of the penitent sinner in the sonnet sequence, and the flat, third-person use of Job as example in the later poem. This disparity in technique and perspective makes the pieces seem less particular to a single author than to authorship by writers within a Protestant tradition.26 Contrary to the current critical orthodoxy, the later poem, itself of uncertain attribution, provides little support for the attribution of the sonnet sequence to Lock. However, a Latin lyric in the Bartholo Silva manuscript attributed to Lock and supporting the radical religious politics of her second husband, Edward Dering, provides more secure evidence of her status as a poet.27 She is also listed among a group of ‘noble Gentlewomen famous for their leaning, as the right honorable Lady Burleigh, my Lady Russel, my Lady Bacon, Mistresse Dering, with others’, in James Sanford’s preface to his 1576 edition of The Garden of Pleasure. This listing links her work with that of the Cooke sisters who were both poets and translators.28 More significant support of the attribution to Lock can be found in connections within the different sections of the 1560 text itself:

Anne Lock’s Miserere mei Deus 21

between Lock’s dedicatory epistle to Catherine Brandon, her translation of the sermons, and the sonnet sequence. Calvin’s sermons on Isaiah 38 centre upon the figure of Hezekiah, his physical affliction and divine cure, and the ramifications for the political state of a godly sovereign. In the dedicatory epistle, Lock specifically links Hezekiah and David, the focus of the sonnet sequence, as complementary examples of the same principle: And that you maye be assured, that this kinde of medicine is not hurtfull: two moste excellent kinges, Ezechias and Dauid, beside an infinite numbre haue tasted the lyke before you, and haue founde health therin, (A4r) In a text which goes on to offer Hezekiah in the sermons and David in the psalm paraphrase as examples of those suffering affliction redeemed and cured by God’s mercy, these two biblical sovereigns are offered as the models through which the text’s medicine is administered, and by whom the reader should be assured of its efficacy. Their linking in the epistle is a strong indication that the concluding sonnet sequences were included by Lock as a complement to her translation of the sermons on Hezekiah.29 Yet there is still a caveat. This connection is not necessarily evidence for authorship of the sequence, but may be a gloss on her editorial method, reinforcing the line in the disclaimer that the meditation has been added ‘for thatit well agreeth with the same argument’. The connection between Hezekiah and David is supplemented by a shared use of Petrarchan imagery in both the epistle and the sequences. Calvin’s account of Hezekiah’s suffering and restoration to health in the sermons works largely metaphorically in presenting a model of right and godly government. Lock’s text, on the other hand, expands upon the Calvinist text in both the dedication and the sonnet sequence in stressing the physicality of that affliction, its effects upon the body of the king. Calvin’s recreation of Hezekiah’s suffering is given this gloss in Lock’s dedicatory epistle: So here this good soules Physicia[n] hath brought you where you maye se lyinge before youre face the good king Ezechias, somtime chillinge and chattering with colde, somtime languishing & meltyng away with heate, nowe fresing, now fryeng, nowe spechelesse, nowe crying out, with other suche piteous panges & passions wrought in his tender afflicted spirit, by giltie conscie[n]ce of his owne fault. . . . You se him sometyme yeldyngly stretch oute, sometyme struglinglye

22 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

throwe his weakned legges not able to sustein his feble body: sometime he casteth abrode, or holdeth vp his white & blodless hand toward the place where his soule longeth: (A7v–A8r) This anatomizing of Hezekiah’s body in illness, the poetic dismemberment of this sick body, offers a particularly Petrarchan blazon. It is supplemented by the Petrarchan tropes of freezing and burning, which were repeated to the point of ubiquity in the Renaissance. But in 1560 in the Elizabethan court, such tropes would have had a freshness that they later lost, and their appearance in Lock’s epistle suggests an interest in Petrarchism consistent with her composition of a Petrarchan sonnet sequence at the end of the text. Further, the sonnets construct David’s sinful body in the same idiom of a physically detailed account of disease: ‘leprous bodie and defiled face’ (Aa4r–v). In a text seeking to present the figures of Hezekiah and David as admonitory models of princeliness, Lock’s curiously material emphasis on the diseased body of the sovereign constructs a consistent anxiety around the body of the ruler. This anxiety is ultimately related to an anxiety about Elizabeth I, which exceeds the text of Calvin’s sermons and reinforces a sense of political instability circulating at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign. Following the early deaths of Edward VI and Mary Tudor, the illness of the sovereign carried with it a potential for political and religious change deeply disturbing to a Protestant community still in exile following Mary’s reign. Hezekiah’s restoration to health from illness was in response to his prayer reminding God ‘how I have walked before thee in truth and with a perfect heart, and have done that which is good in thy sight’.30 The real potential of Elizabeth’s death from illness and the prospect of another period of exile for the Protestant church were seen to be dependent on her heeding the admonitions of such texts and following the examples of Hezekiah’s godly life.31 The Calvinist model of godly kingship is here invested with an anxious materiality in these marginal sections of the text. And this anxiety is manifest in an anomalous use of Petrarchan discourse that suggests a common authorship of both sections. Anomaly may also be recruited as some support for Lock’s authorship of the sequences, as the use of the sonnet form for the meditations concluding Lock’s text has no precedent in the English tradition of psalm paraphrase. In this combination of Petrarchan and Protestant genres, the sequence sits uncomfortably with some aspects of the native literary tradition in England. Although a tradition of psalm paraphrase, developed in the courts of Henry VIII and Edward VI, was paralleled by a

Anne Lock’s Miserere mei Deus 23

broader tradition of the publication of ‘holye songes’ and meditations to which the Parr circle contributed, they dealt with a restricted register of psalms that generally excluded the 51st Psalm and they rarely experimented with Petrarchan lyric forms.32 Even in John King’s revisions to the narrative of the development of Reformation poetry as a corrective to the rise of profane love poetry, he still asserts that in Edward VI’s court secular love lyrics and gospelling verse were seen as generically distinct.33 But the text’s marginality to the canon of Reformation literature is matched by its liminal position in terms of dates of publication, positioned as it is between the securely Protestant reign of Edward VI and the beginning of that of the less certainly Protestant Princess Elizabeth I. Its combination of the imported courtly form of the sonnet and the scriptural text of psalm paraphrase might be seen to look back to a Reformation tradition while commenting upon the direction of poetics in the new Elizabethan court. Published in the second year of Elizabeth’s reign, the Meditation could be seen to participate in the beginning of the Petrarchan cult surrounding the queen. The precedent supplied by Elizabeth’s psalm translation is supplemented by her translation of lines 1–90 of Petrarch’s Triumph of Eternity, copied into the Arundel Harington manuscript early in Elizabeth’s reign.34 The 1560 sequence bridges the Edwardian and Elizabethan courts, by combining penitential meditation grounded in a series of feminine precedents centred on the Parr circle with the sonnet, part of an emergent Petrarchan tradition specifically associated with Elizabeth’s own textual agency. This idiosyncratic generic combination marks an attempt to transfer the models of the court of Edward VI to the new Elizabethan court, and to place Elizabeth’s own early interest in Petrarch under a didactic Protestant pressure. The major sonneteers in the English tradition up to 1560 were Surrey and, more particularly, Wyatt, who also translated the psalms including a paraphrase of Psalm 51. Although Wyatt and Surrey wrote in the earlier half of the sixteenth century, the delay in their publication gives an originality to the form for a reader such as Lock, whose merchant upbringing may have excluded her from access to or knowledge of the manuscript versions of these poems circulating in the court. Wyatt’s Penitential Psalms were first printed in 1549, but more significantly the widely circulated first edition of Tottel’s Miscellany was published in 1557. This context makes the choice of the sonnet form for Lock’s meditation seem less unfashionable. Six editions of Tottel were published by the end of 1559; its influence on the sequence in Lock’s text is indicated by the adoption in her sonnet sequence of the specifically

24 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

‘English’ rhyme scheme and its closing couplet invented and used by Wyatt and Surrey.35 Lock’s position in the Genevan community would have supplemented these generic models by providing her with access to the French and Anglo-Genevan traditions of sonnet and psalm paraphrase. For Lock, and indeed for any of the traditions in which she operated, the publication of Louise Labe´’s Oeuvres in 1556 offered the only precedent of published and accessible woman-authored sonnets.36 Lock also would have had available to her the published poems of Margaret of Navarre, who, like Catherine Parr, published a series of pious meditations. Although none is a sonnet, these meditations adopted a variety of lyric forms, displaying a level of formal experimentation that exceeds the Parr texts. A parallel can be drawn with the male-authored tradition of psalm paraphrase in France and England: Sternhold’s counterpart in the French court was Cle´ment Marot, whose metrical psalm paraphrases used a wide variety of lyric forms and rhyme schemes and a less literal interpretative compass than those of Sternhold.37 Unlike Sternhold, Marot paraphrased the 51st Psalm, and the method of aggregation of the 1560 sonnets, each linked to and expanding on a line from the psalm, follows a pattern used by Marot in his quatrains on the text. Although this impulse towards a more experimental tradition of psalm paraphrase may have been drawn upon by Lock, if she indeed wrote the 1560 sequences, scarcely more precedent exists within the French and Anglo-Genevan traditions than the English for the packaging of psalm meditations as sonnets. Bordier’s collection of Huguenot songs contains only one sonnet: ‘Angoisse de l’ame’ by Malingre, first published in Chansons spirituelles a l’honneur et louange de Dieu in 1555.38 As in England, the increased popularity of the sonnet form in the late sixteenth century in France gave rise to some devotional sonnet sequences, but it was far from a standard generic combination in 1560.39 Nevertheless, the more interpretative cast of the 1560 sequence and its lyrical experimentation may indicate that Marot’s influence combined with the suggestive examples of sonnets in Tottel’s Miscellany to produce the generic combination of sonnet meditation. A translator and poet such as Lock, with links to the gospelling tradition of the court of Edward VI and the Calvinist psalm paraphrases of Marot and Beza during her time in the Genevan exile community, seems perfectly positioned to produce a sequence that would seem strangely anomalous in its use of the sonnet genre if viewed in terms of an English tradition of psalm paraphrase alone. Although there is a reasonable amount of evidence supporting Lock’s authorship of the sonnets, the disclaimer should not be expediently

Anne Lock’s Miserere mei Deus 25

erased. Indeed, some of the uncertainty surrounding the question of attribution challenges the ways in which women’s writing is currently defined. Both sides of the critical response to the disclaimer privilege authorship as the sole ground for determining a text’s status as women’s writing. And both exclude other forms of textual agency – such as editing – in a way that not only simplifies a concept of authorship in the sixteenth century, but also restricts to an unnecessarily narrow compass the relationship of text and gender. As I show through the example of Lock’s text, the political project of recovering early modern women writers has resulted in a disregard for problems of attribution that stems from a desire to fit texts within the cultural and critical category of women’s writing. Ignoring the problematics raised by Barthes and Foucault surrounding the reduction of meaning in a text to the single interpretative frame of authorial intention, gynocritical models of women’s writing assume that the gender of the author unproblematically informs the gender of the text, without allowing for the ambiguities and slippages of meaning inherent in every act of reading and interpretation. The sense that gynocritical feminism is out of step with a wider critical context has been the subject of many critiques, and a set of feminist critical alternatives have been offered in response. These alternatives define women’s writing in terms of its content, its style, and the gender of its audience. But, as Elizabeth Grosz argues, these definitions also have their problems. The construction of women’s writing in terms of content identifies either a set of feminine preoccupations or a feminine sensibility, which depend upon defining ‘women’ as a homogenous group. Women are seen solely in terms of their relationship to an oppressive patriarchy, rather than in terms of their specific position in a complex intersection of cultural discourses including, for example, race or class. The identification of a particularly gendered ‘style’ meets with similar problems. It assumes a consistently feminine writing position or relation to language that again writes out local difference. The strategy of relating the gender of the text to the gender of its reader appears at first to sidestep the essentialism inherent in both gynocritical and revisionary models, but, as Grosz points out, it still depends upon the idea of a continuous, intentional subject, and so reduces the meaning of a text to a single destination.40 A text such as the 1560 sonnets complicates such definitions of women’s writing further: while probably attributable to Lock, and perhaps only read by a coterie audience as her work, its circulation under the initials A.L. meant that it was not generally read as an example of feminine textual practice in an early modern context. Thus it falls

26 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

outside even those paratextual conventions recently applied to expand the definition of women’s writing to include, for example, texts circulated under feminine signatures.41 Rather than ignoring its strategies of anonymity, and anxiously placing this text in the problematic category of women’s writing, I want to examine Lock’s text differently here. Jennifer Summit and Marcy North have recently differentiated the categories of female authorship, writing and voice as critical conventions that do not always overlap, in an attempt to broaden the field of early women’s writing and to analyze its exclusions and formations.42 This differentiation is particularly useful in the case of the 1560 text, as even in the different sections of the text itself, conventions of authorship, writing and voice are constantly reconfigured in a shifting and unstable relationship to femininity. The remainder of this chapter examines these shifts. Specifically, it explores the ways in which the sonnets might be considered as instances of female writing, or female voice, even if they cannot be securely located in terms of female authorship.

The politics of dedication and circulation There is, I believe, at least a contingent sense in which the Sermons at least might be categorized as an instance of female writing. If the text was translated and edited by Anne Lock, read as such by at least a small circle including family and friends, as the British Library inscription suggests, and dedicated by Lock to Catherine Brandon, then at that moment in its circulation history it can indeed be understood as an example of feminine textual practice. My emphasis is on local contingency here, which need not be extended to encompass a universal identification of the gender of its author or voice, nor to imply a single, unified reading subject. Gender might then inflect the text in two ways: through its activation of a particular, feminized line of political pressure directed towards the sovereign, and through the textual negotiations necessitated by the entry of a middle-class woman’s voice into print at this moment in history. The dedication to Catherine Brandon is very significant in this context. Brandon was the subject of ten dedications by authors, translators and editors, and was the patron of John Harington, another writer of mid-sixteenth-century devotional sonnets. In comparison, Mary Fitzroy received no dedications, Catherine Parr only two, and Anne Seymour, Duchess of Somerset, six dedications by writers and translators and two by booksellers. The fact that Brandon was identified as a patron in so many texts arises from her enduring status as a religious and political figure. Mary Tudor’s reign suppressed the

Anne Lock’s Miserere mei Deus 27

activities of the two Protestant patrons of this group who remained in England, Anne Seymour and Mary Fitzroy, and with the accession of Elizabeth I, Anne Seymour remained in obscurity. Catherine Brandon, on the other hand, was exiled from England under Mary’s reign and became a popularized figure after her return. She became the subject of a ballad by Thomas Deloney and of a play by Thomas Drue, both centred on the adventures of her exile and taking her return as symbolic of the restoration of peace and ‘prosperitie’ of ‘Queene Elizabethes happie raigne’.43 Her significance as a Protestant political figure is indicated by a separate piece in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments of those persecuted in Mary’s reign.44 The dedicatory epistle to Brandon associates the text therefore with a figure with both a popular and a courtly identity, an identity mobilized in the text’s project of disseminating God’s word through Calvin to a wide audience. However, I would like to suggest that the dedication to Brandon might also have a more specific political focus than a straightforward bid for patronage within the court and for a popular readership: it addresses through this patron a second female reader, Elizabeth I. The Elizabethan state in 1559 and 1560 was characterized by an anxiety over Elizabeth’s religious allegiances, especially among the exiled Protestant communities. The perceived fragility of Elizabeth’s commitment to Protestantism and her need for ‘counsel . . . by her godly male subjects’ are seen in Calvin’s letter to William Cecil, 1559:45 But since it is scarcely possible that in so disturbed and confused a state of affairs, she should not, in the beginning of her reign, be distracted, held in suspense by perplexities, and often forced to hold a vacillating course, I have taken the liberty of advising her that having once entered upon the right path, she should unflinchingly persevere therein.46 It has been argued that Elizabeth was in fact a committed Protestant, who in 1559 determined and achieved her preferred religious settlement in the face of conservative Catholic opposition.47 Revisions of that position argue that the religious settlement was made by a queen under constraint and manipulated within the court, and that a document seen to register her early Protestantism, such as her translation of A Godly Meditation of the Soul, was a conservative piece recruited by John Bale for the Protestant cause. If Elizabeth’s political Protestantism has been questioned, her religious conservatism, which had been dismissed by those arguing for her commitment to Protestantism as expedient public

28 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

policy, was so consistently manifested that Patrick Collinson argues for it as a reflection of Elizabeth’s own position.48 A point of focus for this personal conservatism was Elizabeth’s reinstatement of the cross and candlesticks in the royal chapel in October 1559 for the marriage of one of her ladies, in the face of official injunctions of the same year calling for the removal of ‘things superstitious’ from churches, terms interpreted by Protestants to include the cross. Collinson suggests that the reaction of Protestant bishops to Elizabeth’s retention of the cross and candlesticks in the royal chapel indicates the anxiety that her action provoked in Protestant circles, and the uncertainty attaching to her religious alliances during this early period of her reign.49 Catherine Brandon wrote to William Cecil in the early months of 1559, expressing a parallel concern to that expressed by Calvin and the wider Protestant community. She, too, questioned the extent of Elizabeth’s commitment to Protestantism in the light of her engagement with the outward forms of Catholicism: Wherefore I am forced to say with the Prophet Elie, ‘How long halt ye between two opinions?’ If the mass be good, tarry not to follow it, nor take from it no part of that honour which the last Queen in her notable stoutness brought it to and left it in, wherein she deserved immortal praise, seeing she was so persuaded that it was good. But if you be not so persuaded, alas, who should move the Queen to honour it with her presence, or any of her councillors. Well, it is so reported here that Her Majesty tarried but the Gospel, and so departed. I pray God that no part of the report were true, but that you know there is no part of it good after that sort as they use it.50 This focus on the mass in Brandon’s letter indicates a Protestant political activism which makes her choice as the object of Anne Lock’s dedication for a translation of sermons on Hezekiah particularly pointed. The biblical model repeatedly recruited to Protestant iconoclasm was Hezekiah. His rule was characterized by an active support for the purge of idolatry during his reign, and his history, as Margaret Aston has shown, was closely associated with the typology and symbolism of the cross.51 Hezekiah’s purge of idolatry was centred on the destruction of ‘the brasen serpent that Moses had made’.52 This serpent, made by Moses at God’s command, was set upon a pole as a sign of God’s granting of eternal life to the faithful, and prefigured in the Old Testament the body of Christ upon the cross as a sign of God’s salvation. But to early Elizabethan Protestants, the brazen serpent and the cross were linked as

Anne Lock’s Miserere mei Deus 29

images that had become idols, irredeemably abused by false worship. Hezekiah’s destruction of the serpent became a model directed by Protestants towards their sovereigns, promoting the destruction of the idol of the cross. Calvin’s dedicatory epistle in The Geneva Bible specifically cites Hezekiah to Elizabeth as advocacy for rapid reform of the state to avoid God’s punishment.53 Nicholas Udall’s play Ezechias, written under Henry VIII, was performed for Elizabeth when she visited Cambridge in 1564, and the contemporary account of Abraham Hartwell described the ways the opening of the play dramatized Hezekiah’s destruction of idols and restoration of the true religion.54 However, the play continued with a narrative of the heathen rebellion against these actions, and the threat that the heathens posed to both Hezekiah and Jerusalem, and it figured Hezekiah’s affliction for his actions as divine punishment before the Lord’s deliverance. The threat implicit within this story was not lost on Elizabeth; she failed to attend the next night’s performance of Ajax Flagellifer by King’s College students, and instead retired early, ‘tyred with going about [to] the Colleges, and [with] hearing of Disputations, and over-watched with former Plays’.55 This context repositions the translation of the sermons on Hezekiah as an admonitory text specifically directed towards Elizabethan policy during 1559. The translation of the first sermon makes reference to Hezekiah’s purge of idolatry as an example of ‘howe he framed all hys lyfe to the law of God’ and established the ‘trewe and pure religyon’ in the state. The translation places no special gloss on this passage; it conforms almost exactly to the French edition of Calvin’s sermons on Hezekiah published by Francois E´stienne in 1562.56 The point is that the text’s intervention comes not as a gendered rewriting of Calvin’s sermons, but through the dissemination of Calvin’s text in English at a historical moment when the policies of Hezekiah could be seen as a comment upon Elizabeth’s religious actions. It is also a period where the broader phenomenon of female authority was represented in terms of idolatry: in John Knox’s 1558 First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, women’s rule is famously represented as an idol: ‘that which hath the form and appearance but lacketh the virtue and strength which the name and proportion do resemble and promise’.57 In this context, the invocation of Hezekiah’s actions against idolatry carries a second meaning: undermining the perceived legitimacy of Elizabeth’s reign, should the right and godly practice advocated here be ignored. Any admonitory instruction of Elizabeth from a figure such as Lock, writing from outside the court, had to be couched in less direct terms

30 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

than the attempted epistolary interventions of a figure such as Catherine Brandon. Consequently, Lock’s admonition to Elizabeth is implied through models of Old Testament kingship and framed as an instruction in duty to Catherine Brandon rather than as a direct address to the queen. Brandon, the object of God’s healing medicine, enters into a relationship of ‘receipte’, of bondage to the physician and messenger: But we se dayly, when skilfull men by arte, or honest neyghbours hauyng gathered vnderstandyng of some specyall dysease & the healing therof by theyr owne experiment, do applie their knowledge to the restoring of health of any mans body in any corporall sicknesse, howe thankfully it is taken, howe muche the releued patient accompteth him selfe bo[u]nd to him by meane of whose aide and ministration he findeth himself holpen or eased. What then deserueth he, that teacheth such a receipt . . . ? This receipte God the heauenly Physitian hath taught, his most excelle[n]t Apothecarie master Iohn Caluine hath compounded, & I your graces most bounden & humble haue put into an Englishe box, & do present vnto you. (A3r) It is the receipt, the concept of duty, rather than the message, which is boxed for Brandon here; the text invokes the relationship as much as the teaching, and in this move seeks to mobilize Brandon’s demonstrated political interests and agency within the court in the service of Lock’s project.58 The duty owed slips from physician to messenger in the looseness of the phrase ‘him by meane of whose aide and ministration he findeth himself holpen or eased’, allowing the author to invoke the bonds of personal patronage as well as a wider duty to the promotion of Calvinism.59 This relationship of duty is extended from Brandon to Elizabeth by the text’s mediation of its message through the images affliction visited on the bodies of the kings David and Hezekiah. While it does not attempt to teach Elizabeth her duty directly, the text concerns itself with invoking and defining the relationship and extent of duty between author and ideally Protestant patron in the epistle, and between subjects and an ideally Protestant sovereign in the sermons. The Sermons is a particularly interesting text in that it mobilizes a female patron to put political pressure upon the sovereign through a persuasive rhetoric of service and duty, which is analogous to that practised in male patronage relationships. Moreover, the message packaged for the sovereign is one that diverges little from its male-authored copytext. The patronage relationship defined here offers few grounds for the location of an essentially ‘feminine’ sensibility within the text, and

Anne Lock’s Miserere mei Deus 31

its engagement with sovereign religious practice contests received notions of early modern women’s confinement to the household. My argument here calls on a more subtle notion of gender and politics in which gender does not preclude the possibility of political engagement in this context, but defines the ways in which that political pressure is exerted. It is achieved through a textual mobilization of the limited patronage circles and subject positions open to a merchant-class woman writer such as Anne Lock. These are avenues exploited by Lock again in 1572 in a manuscript produced by two of the Cooke sisters, Elizabeth Hoby and Mildred Cecil, dedicated to Leicester and aimed again at Queen Elizabeth. Lock’s Latin poem in the Bartholo Silva manuscript forms part of a Protestant humanist project to conciliate Elizabeth and direct her towards a more radical position, in line with the politics of Lock’s second husband, Edward Dering.60 It is again a political text, but one that is circulated in ways that might be defined as feminine only through a particular, local circulation history: in this instance through a mobilization of a particular patronage network and the pursuit of a Protestant political agenda. Both the sermons and the Latin poem resist generalized definitions of women’s writing. Instead, they suggest a more open and less essentialist model of the ways in which gender and textuality intersect, which might allow these texts to be seen to work in new and surprising ways in the period.

Out-troping Wyatt Conventional models of early modern women’s writing limit not only the possibilities for a text’s political engagement in the period, but also an understanding of its position in the literary field. In the case of the 1560 Meditation, the much-rehearsed argument characterizing the gender codes of the Petrarchan sonnet sequence as limiting women’s entry into the genre comes under challenge. Instead, this text illuminates the opportunities that might be available to both a male and a female writer participating in the genre at the specific historical moment of the late 1550s, notwithstanding the fact that any entry into the genre was negotiated by a disclaimer and anonymous circulation. Most startling in this text is its rhetorical ambition. To understand the Meditation as rhetorically ambitious, as a work of literary inventiveness, is to offer a reading contrary to Roland Greene’s analysis of the poems as a ‘refusal of invention’. His analysis depicts the sonnets as a work that focuses and enlarges on the matter of the received text, rather than using it as a basis for foregrounding, as Wyatt, Surrey and the other writers in Tottel did,

32 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

‘the illusion of the speaker’s individuality’.61 According to Greene, the Meditiaton is remarkable in that it ‘expands its model twelvefold while struggling to say almost nothing new’. Its only invention is seen to be the occasional eruption from ‘the sociolect of the times’, and it is understood to demonstrate ‘a single unmodulated outlook, . . . gesturing implicitly toward a single turn to God that is their speaker’s sole constitutive experience’.62 But in an English tradition and to an English audience, even the taking up of both the sonnet and the psalm paraphrase acts as an out-troping of Wyatt, whose sonnets were circulating in print from 1557 and whose psalms were published in 1549. To a reader of Tottel, an important source of precedent for the Meditation, Wyatt was introduced in ‘The Printer to the Reader’ as ‘depewitted’, praised by Surrey for his learning, his ‘rare wit’ and ‘vertues rare’ and immortalized by the fame surrounding his ‘liuely name’ after death.63 More significantly, he was praised by Surrey as a psalmist whose depiction of David provided an admonitory model for rulers: What holy graue? what worthy sepulture To Wiattes Psalmes should Christians then purchase? Where he doth paint the liuely faith, and pure, The stedfast hope, the swete returne to grace Of iust Dauid, by perfite penitence. Where rulers may se in a mirrour clere The bitter frute of false concupiscence: How Iewry bought Vrias death full dere. In princes hartes gods scourge imprinted depe, Ought them awake, out of their sinfull slepe. (2:27) The Meditation’s engagement with Wyatt’s poetry not only presents formal correspondences, signalling a Petrarchan textual over-reaching, but also parallels Wyatt’s use of David as a mirror to the sovereign, ‘where rulers may se in a mirrour clere / The bitter frute of false concupiscence’. In its recruitment of both Wyatt’s generic models and his perceived political strategy, the Meditation concludes a project begun in the larger text’s dedication and continued in its sermons, a project of admonitory Protestantism that was ultimately directed towards the ruler Elizabeth. The Meditation signals its connection with Wyatt’s paraphrase on the 51st Psalm by adopting Wyatt’s innovative structure of prefacing the psalm paraphrase with a short, original sequence. Wyatt presents David ‘wearied’, at rest and alone, overcome with grief and deprived of sense:

Anne Lock’s Miserere mei Deus 33

‘Down from his eyes a storm of tears descends, / Without feeling, that trickle on the ground.’64 The Meditation’s penitent sinner is similarly confronted and confounded by sin, and represented in the opening sonnet of the preface through the same tropes of blood and tears: The hainous gylt of my forsaken ghost So threates, alas, vnto my febled sprite Deserued death, and (that me geueth most) Still stand so fixt before my daseld sight The lothesome filthe of my desteined life, The mighty wrath of myne offended Lorde, My Lorde whos wrath is sharper than the knife, And deper woundes than dobleedged sworde, That, as the dimmed and fordulled eyen Full fraught with teares & more & more opprest With growing streames of the distilled bryne Sent from the fornace of a grefefull brest, Can not enioy the comfort of the light, Nor finde the waye wherein to walke aright:(Aa2r) The reworking of Wyatt in this section shifts from his third-person, descriptive observation of David to a first-person expansion on the now genderless penitent sinner’s subjective experience of sin. This shift stresses the individual’s interaction with God in line with Calvinist theology, and provides by default or omission a subject position available to readers of both genders. As Suzanne Trill points out, this strategy is one often used by early modern women in their incorporation of the psalms in their own writing. It stands in contrast to that of maleauthored texts based on the psalms and directed towards a female readership, such as Thomas Bentley’s The Monument of Matrones, where feminine pronouns are substituted for masculine.65 But the Meditation does more than rework Wyatt’s formal strategies to include a woman reader. Carl Rasmussen has pointed to a connection between the psychologized basis of Protestantism in the 1560s and a tradition of vernacular Continental poetics.66 He bases his argument upon the two Protestant foundations of belief: the vanity of worldly things and the knowledge of the divine. According to Calvin, Protestant faith was a mode of knowledge ‘revealed to our minds, and sealed on our hearts, by the Holy Spirit’; it was transferred or intimated in a visionary rather than a didactic sense through the subjective experience of the reader. The concept of the vanity of worldly things did not situate vanity within the

34 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

phenomenal world, but within its abuse, an abuse constituted by the subjective pressure put upon the external world by the fallen will. Both tenets are psychologized, transferred to subjective and individual experience, although as Rasmussen points out the registers of subjective and objective states are not as sharply estranged in pre-Cartesian philosophy: ‘the essence of objectivity could be found in the depth of subjectivity – or God in soul.’67 The poetry of Petrarchism, with its intense focus upon the construction of the speaking subject and that subject’s psychological shifts, provides to the Protestant subject a model for the construction of subjectivity at a point when spiritual doctrine placed a new emphasis on the subjective state of the individual through the psychologizing of its major tenets. The Meditation reworks Wyatt’s prologue to the 51st Psalm in these Protestant terms of the penitent sinner’s subjective experience of despair. One of the ways in which it achieves this is by extending a nascent shift in Wyatt from the divine to the secular, through a shift in the Petrarchan subject’s access to lines of sight.68 Wyatt’s David has one refuge in despair, sight of God: ‘he can none other thing / And look up still unto the heaven’s king’. By contrast, the Meditation’s new genderless penitent sinner is blind, a blindness elaborated upon in the second sonnet of the preface: So I blinde wretch, whome Gods inflamed ire With pearcing stroke hath throwne vnto the grou[n]d, Amidde my sinnes still groueling in the myre, Finde not the way that other oft haue found, Whome cherefull glimse of gods abounding grace Hath oft releued and oft with shyning light Hath brought to ioy out of the vgglye place. (Aa2r) The Meditation takes up a movement at the conclusion of Wyatt’s prefatory sequence of four poems, where the gaze is averted from God to self and leads into the release of the desiring voice in psalm paraphrase: Like as he whom his own thought affrays He turns his look. Him seemeth that the shade Of his offence again his force assays By violence despair on him to lade. Starting like him whom sudden fear dismays, His voice he strains and from his heart outbrings This song that I not whether he cries or sings.69

Anne Lock’s Miserere mei Deus 35

The focus of the Meditation on Wyatt’s internal direction of the gaze of the penitent subject shifts the emphasis of the sequence from God to self, privileging the subjective apprehension of God over his objective presence, in a movement that is typically Petrarchan both in its emphasis on the textual subject and its anxiety of influence. Its innovative generic combination of sonnet and psalm paraphrase expands a connection offered, but not exploited, by Wyatt’s psalm paraphrase and his generic history. The text’s formal out-troping of Wyatt is supplemented in the longer psalm paraphrase by a similar Petrarchan dynamic of poetic competition. In this case, poetic competition is transferred to the role of admonitory psalmist to sovereigns. The ‘mirrour clere’ identified by Surrey in Wyatt’s work is taken up in the Meditation, but now, in the context of the early Elizabethan context of its publication, the ruler and psalmist David is used to supplement the example of the iconoclast Hezekiah as a model for Elizabeth. Sonnet 5 uses the trope of blazon again to present a selfmotivated display of the sinful body of the speaker, David: My cruell conscience with sharpned knife Doth splat my ripped hert, and layes abrode The lothsome secretes of my filthy life, And spredes them forth before the face of God. (Aa4v) The body is dismembered and displayed in order that it might become a vehicle for the redemption of the church, thus reinforcing and dilating the male speaker’s subjectivity in a movement parallel to Petrarch’s construction of his subjective self as laureate over the fragmented body of Laura. The sequence parallels David’s broken body with that of Christ on the cross, recruiting even his objectification to a Neo-platonic project where the speaker, like God, offers a part of himself as a sacrifice to redeem the world: But thy swete sonne alone, With one sufficing sacrifice for all Appeaseth thee, and maketh the at one With sinfull man, and hath repaird our fall. That sacred hoste is euer in thine eyes. The praise of that I yeld for sacrifice. I yeld my self, I offer vp my ghoste, My slayne delightes, my dyeing hart to thee. To God a trobled sprite is pleasing hoste. (Aa7v)

36 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

The redemption which this sacrifice effects is for the political and religious state of David’s realm: Shew mercie, Lord, not vnto me alone: But stretch thy fauor and thy pleased will, To sprede thy bountie and thy grace vpon Sion, for Sion is thy holly hyll: That thy Hierusalem with mighty wall May be enclosed vnder thy defense, And bylded so that it may neuer fall By myning fraude or mighty violence. Defend thy chirch, Lord, and aduaunce it soe, So in despite of tyrannie to stand, That tre[m]bling at thy power the world may know It is vpholden by thy mighty hand: That Sion and Hierusalem may be A safe abode for them that honor thee. (Aa7v–Aa8r) The reference to ‘thy chirch’ represents a departure from the words of the psalm, and from the available paraphrases before 1560, in which religion is couched in more general terms.70 The paraphrase dramatizes David’s spiritual and physical abasement in order to construct a parallel to Christ’s sacrifice by God to repair the fall of the members of the Christian church. David’s song is rewritten in the Meditation to become a sacrifice through which God’s grace will redeem not only the city of Jerusalem, but the church. The inclusion of the imagery of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross – ‘But thy swete sonne alone, / With one sufficing sacrifice for all’ – which allows David’s despair to become redemptive of Church as well as state, is, of course, an anachronism, projecting David’s voice forward to describe an event in the future in a substantial deviation from the words of the psalm. It could hardly be described, in Greene’s terms, as writing ‘as though in perpetual speech, without the topography of invention’.71 This departure is highlighted by the juxtaposition of paraphrase and the psalm text upon which it expands: ‘If thou haddest desired sacrifice, I wold haue geuen / thou delyghtest not in burnt offringes.’ This prolepsis moves the sequence forwards to the origins of Christianity and beyond to the author’s own period, in which the exemplary figure of David is the sovereign, Elizabeth. With this move, the text becomes a prosopopoeia for Elizabeth’s voice as a New Testament David. Hezekiah is offered in the sermons as an exemplary king in his destruction of the brazen serpent, precursive image in Old Testament

Anne Lock’s Miserere mei Deus 37

typology for the cross; the voice of David in the sonnets offers the sinner’s redeemed heart as an equivalent to Christ’s death on the cross, as an appropriate sacrifice to God and a means of redeeming state and church. Both Wyatt and Marot place a typically Protestant gloss on David’s rejection of sacrifice in the 51st Psalm by suggesting that the sacrifice that God desires is internal and individual: ‘sprite contrite; low heart in humble wise’; ‘vne Ame dolente: / Vn coeur submis, vne Ame penitente’.72 Both, however, maintain that these reformed hearts allow and authorise the ‘outward deeds’ of sacrifice in a paraphrase of the final lines of the psalm. But in the Meditation, the external deeds of the sacrifice become the yielding of the heart in a parallel to David’s experience. The detailed inventory of ‘sacrifice of righteousness’ in the psalm – ‘burnt offringes and oblations . . . young bullockes’ – which is maintained in Marot’s version of the psalm as ‘Oblations telles que tu demandes: / Adonc les Boeufz’, is changed in the 1560 paraphrase to a metaphorical sacrifice of the reformed heart: Then on thy hill, and in thy walled towne, Thou shalt receaue the pleasing sacrifice. The brute shall of thy praised name resoune In thankfull mouthes, and then with gentle eyes Thou shalt behold vpon thine altar lye Many a yelden host of humbled hart, And round about then shall thy people crye: We praise thee, God our God: thou onely are The God of might, of mercie, and of grace. That I then, Lorde, may also honor thee, Releue my sorow, and my sinnes deface: Be, Lord of mercie, mercifull to me: Restore my feling of thy grace againe: Assure my soule, I craue it not in vaine. (Aa8r) The paraphrase retains some points of reference to the psalm, but the literal sacrifice is made through the ‘yelden host’. The host is represented in terms of sight or knowledge of God – ‘That sacred host is ever in thine eyes’ – rather than a physical sacrifice, and the sequence concludes with a more ambiguous reading of the righteousness of physical sacrifice and outward deeds in favour of a sustained emphasis on the sacrifice implicit in the reformed and humbled heart. David’s internal reformation has led to the parallel reformation of his subjects; but this restored church is contingent upon his personal restoration to grace.

38 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

The sequence again departs from the paraphrase and earlier versions of the psalm in its conclusion in uncertainty. It ends not with the imagery of right sacrifice but with the speaker’s individual desire for mercy and grace, which, if granted, will restore his state and church. If Lock’s linking of the figures of Hezekiah and David in the epistle suggests that both elements of the text seek to direct the sovereign as complementary examples of ideal Protestant sovereignty, then the message to Elizabeth in the sonnets is clear. The reformed heart of the monarch will lead to a similar reformation in the hearts of the people and a restoration of the church and the state. But, crucially, it involves a humility, a yielding to God and a pursuit of the godly path on the part of the ruler, which is seen as by no means assured. The sequence finishes by reinforcing the model of godly government and the iconoclastic message associated with Hezekiah by the Protestant community and outlined by the sermons. The sonnets function as a carefully constructed gloss on the sermons: as if the veiled association of Elizabeth with Hezekiah were not enough, the figure of David is recruited as a subjective restatement of the king’s frailty and the consequences of his sin for the religious and political state. The ‘bitter frutes of false concupiscence’ that Wyatt sought to reveal through David’s voice become not the results of carnal desire that disturbed the Henrician state, but the results of a nascent Elizabethan adherence to ‘things of the world’ in religion: the material trappings of Catholicism privileged above the cultivation of a subjective godliness preferred by radical Protestants. If at least partially attributed to Lock, the text as a whole, directed initially towards a specifically feminized readership as a way of exerting political pressure upon the sovereign, shows a woman writer operating in surprisingly ambitious and uncircumscribed ways in the political and literary spheres of the early Elizabethan state. This is surprising, however, only in terms of models of gender that rely upon overdetermined and unchanging constructions of the early modern woman writer, confining her to certain genres, modes of circulation and a limited political agency. A more flexible and contingent model of gender opens up the possibilities and limitations of women writing in some of the same ways as men at this point in history at least, in ways that reflect the complexity of each historical moment of a text’s production and circulation.

2 Generating Absence: The Sonnets of Mary Stuart

In 1996, Jennifer Summit’s article ‘The Arte of a Ladies Penne: Elizabeth I and the Poetics of Queenship’ argued for the first time that the relationship between Elizabeth I and her cousin Mary Queen of Scots was played out through the circulation of their texts. Summit constructs an ingenious argument surrounding the writing of Elizabeth I, linking her poetics of queenship with a ‘poetics of covertness’: Elizabeth’s use of the discourse of secrecy to construct public knowledge as private. Elizabeth positions her readers as privileged insiders coveting those secrets, and uses privacy itself to produce the public effects upon which her authority as female sovereign depended. Elizabeth’s complex manipulation of the terms of coterie manuscript poetry is contrasted with a group of Mary Stuart’s texts to demonstrate ‘how both queens adapted poetic topoi to construct a language of female readership’.1 However, in constructing Mary’s poetics, the article briefly discusses one letter and a manuscript poem sent by Mary to Elizabeth in 1568, then focuses its argument for Mary’s textuality not upon her widely circulated body of writing, but upon a collection of her embroideries. Summit reads Mary’s use of Petrarchan figures as conduits of the author’s emotional state, as ‘confessions of her own vulnerability’, and as ‘a means of figuring her own fear and helplessness as effects of desire’. She then argues for a competing poetics of queenship in ‘that most feminine of media, embroidery’, which uses the emblems of plants, flourishing through the horticultural arts of binding and wounding, to figure oppression as a source of strength.2 Within an article critiquing essentialist categorizations of early modern women’s writing as private, the relationship between Elizabeth and Mary is constructed as a binary: Elizabeth’s complex manipulation of the cultural norms of femininity 39

40 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

and textuality contrasted with Mary’s emotionally direct and privately exchanged texts in explicitly feminized media. Encoded here, in even the most sophisticated of approaches to the textuality of Mary Queen of Scots, is a set of deeply embedded cultural assumptions that have made her written texts persistently unavailable to critics of the early modern period. With the recent exception of politicized readings of the casket sonnets by Peter Herman and Sarah Dunnigan, almost all considerations of Mary Stuart’s poetry to date have been in terms of its limitation, associated with the speaker’s status as a woman, and her difficulty in negotiating the terms of gender, textuality and sovereignty.3 As Margaret Ezell has argued, these assumptions have their roots in a history of representation of early modern women writers informed by a mid-eighteenth-century cult of sensibility, which characterized that writing in terms of a set of essentially feminine characteristics. These critics conflate the authorial and textual subjectivity of women writers and represent women both as inherently sensitive, emotional and intuitive and as confined to the sphere of the household.4 Disseminated through the medium of the anthology, this model has been consistently repeated and naturalized until recent revisions of early modern women’s writing, which have broken down such categories and sought to reposition these texts in dialogue with a political context. Criticism casting the early modern woman writer’s work in private and essentially feminine terms has become old-fashioned – except, it seems, in the case of Mary Queen of Scots, where a complicated history of biographical representation, linked to problems of textual attribution, have left her writing largely off limits. Yet hers are culturally loaded and widely circulated texts that had a profound effect upon the practices and boundaries of early modern women’s writing.

The casket sonnets: Attribution, circulation and sovereign textuality Also circulated in manuscript in 1568, and available to Summit’s analysis, is a second text attributed to Mary Stuart, which constructs a very different poetics of queenship: the 12-poem sequence known as the casket sonnets. The sonnets form part of the incriminating materials claimed to be found in a silver casket by the Scottish lords seeking to depose Mary from the throne. These materials, including the sonnets, were used by Mary’s enemies in the commissions of York and Westminster as evidence for her complicity both in the murder of her second husband Darnley and in her marriage to Bothwell, and were first circulated

Generating Absence: The Sonnets of Mary Stuart 41

in print as Protestant propaganda. Published in George Buchanan’s Ane Detectiovn of the duinges of Marie Quene of Scottes, the casket sonnets were one of the most widely circulated examples of poetry under a feminine signature in the period. In a complicated publishing history, the 1571 English version of the Detectiovn was released in two issues, probably from the press of John Daye, and was followed in 1572 by a Scottish edition from the press of Robert Lekprevik and a third French edition published at La Rochelle, although the text gives its place of publication as Edinburgh.5 The English edition was reprinted in 1577 and 1578; in total, the sequence was circulated in five different editions in seven years. Although the recovery of reading response is always speculative, Jayne E. Lewis argues that contemporary references to the texts indicate that they were read by at least some sections of their audience as genuine: Norfolk describes them ‘as diverse fond ballads of her own hand’ and Gabriel Harvey refers to ‘the tragicall pamphlets of the Queen of Scots worth the reading over and over, both for the style and the matter’. Lewis also notes that the most influential of the Catholic defenses of Mary that responded to the Detectiovn, written by John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, implicitly allows for the possibility of their authenticity by a curiously ambivalent treatment of Mary’s agency in marrying Bothwell. Leslie’s response, arguing that ‘no man or woman fall to extreme lewdness all at once’ and outlining the circumstances – ‘the distress, the discomfort, and desolation wherein she was presently bewrapped’ – that led to Mary’s choice of third husband, is seen by Lewis to invoke pity rather than disbelief.6 Yet the sonnets’ status as instruments of the political interests of the Scottish and English courts means their extensive discussion has been almost exclusively within an historical context, as evidence for Mary’s guilt if genuine, or innocence if forged. The way in which they have been read is exemplified by the marginal notes to their only contemporary manuscript copy, which function as a key in identifying historical figures and biographical events in the text.7 The enormous body of materials that make up the reception history of the sonnets couple an insistently biographical lens with an unresolved and limited discussion of attribution. This approach has relegated this central and widely circulated text to the margins of the field of early modern women’s writing. The unwieldy critical context formed by the vast, repetitive and selfgenerating body of material that forms the attribution debate accounts to some extent for the text’s critical neglect. The attribution debate centres on three main areas: the time and method of the deployment of the casket materials; their material status; and consideration of details

42 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

within the materials in relationship to Mary’s biography. The most compelling arguments for the texts’ authenticity rest with their deployment, specifically in Jenny Wormald’s arguments discussing James VI’s reluctance to make public the original manuscripts of the letters, sonnets and contracts. The originals disappeared in 1584, at the very time when Elizabeth requested them as part of her quest to justify the execution of Mary. Elizabeth already possessed copies of the documents, and she had no reason to ask for the originals unless she believed their authenticity could be used politically; neither did James have reason to deny them unless he too was aware they were available for such use.8 Further, as Wormald suggests, if they were forgeries, James had a strong motivation to reveal them as such. In 1584, he was attempting to restore the name of the Scottish monarchy, and passed an act in parliament forbidding calumnies against the crown, which included the king’s ‘parents and progenitors’. This movement included the banning of two of Buchanan’s works, and considerable political mileage could have been made through a demonstration that the original casket documents were forgeries. Instead, this is the exact point when they are lost. This indicates that both Elizabeth and James, who each had an opportunity to examine the original casket documents, suspected that their further dissemination would reinforce arguments for their authenticity. The most compelling arguments for the inauthenticity of the materials, however, rest with the material status of the documents themselves. Pro-Marian historians have pointed out that the letters are not signed, dated or subscribed. Further, they were were probably tampered with; in contrast to their later lack of subscription, an Act of the Scottish Parliament of 4 December 1567 describes the letters as ‘diuers her previe lettrez writtin and subscriuit with hir awin hand’.9 There was precedent for the forgery of Mary’s handwriting and forgery was prevalent in the Scottish court; Mary herself claimed in a contemporary defence that there were several in the court who could copy her handwriting. However compelling these arguments for the forgery of the letters, they are less easily applied to the sonnets, as a different set of conventions for signature and subscription attaches to manuscript poetry. Similarly, the plethora of arguments for inconsistencies between Mary’s biography and the internal detail of the letters and sonnets, usually suggesting their authorship by another woman in the Scottish court, rest upon an unproblematic relationship between authorial and textual subjects particularly inappropriate to the poetic genre of the sonnet sequence.10 Although arguments surrounding the authenticity of the sonnets and the letters are obviously connected, specificities of the debate relating to

Generating Absence: The Sonnets of Mary Stuart 43

generic difference of the materials have been ignored. However, in the absence of any autograph manuscripts, the debate remains unresolved. The impossibility of assigning authorship forecloses a set of possible readings of the casket sonnets, particularly ones using the sonnets to stage arguments for an intentional poetics of queenship paralleling recent arguments for Elizabeth’s textual production of her authority.11 But here it is precisely the forced indirection of relationship between author, text and signature that again calls into question some of the methodologies underpinning current readings of sovereign textual practice. And it is the text’s associated strangeness, the sense that such lurid and emotional poetry could not possibly have been written by Mary Stuart, that challenges the boundaries of what might constitute the field of early modern women’s poetry in the specific context of the late 1560s. The continued status of the casket sonnets at the margins of literary history indicates the investment maintained in early modern gender studies in linking the body of the author to the text, and the impact that such a strategic retention of an authorial subject position might have upon the literary field. At stake here is a construction of gender that, despite a decade of criticism using Judith Butler’s formulations of gender as performance, remains curiously inflexible, tied to the body of the author rather than the material practices of circulation in the period.12 Reconsidering the text through such revisionary feminist models, however, presents problems of its own. The sequence has a puzzling unfamiliarity, which fuels the attribution debate and derives from its graphic depiction of a feminine erotic subjection and rivalry at odds with assumed parameters of decorous feminine subjectivity and textuality. The casket sonnets’ difficulty lie at one level with the unfamiliarity of their generic combinations and of their use of the unframed female voice as erotic subject, in part a consequence of a selective reception history of early modern women’s writing, which in the past privileged religious and ‘private’ writing. But this difficulty also derives from the particular history of circulation of this scandalous sequence. Circulated at the very beginning of the English Renaissance, and drawing on a range of generic and textual precedents, the casket sonnets both open up a sense of what the field might have been and simultaneously close off those possibilities. The wide circulation of the indecorous casket sonnets, their ‘success’ as Protestant propaganda, conversely worked towards making the genres of the sonnet sequence and complaint unavailable to a generation of women poets, and they mark both the beginning and the end of certain types of Elizabethan feminine lyric agency.

44 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

One way of approaching the sonnets outside the parameters of the attribution debate is through the history of their contemporary circulation, which was driven by the propaganda policies of the Scottish and the English courts. Buchanan was instructed to prepare the documents that Moray and his supporters were to take to England as material justifying Mary’s forced abdication, and his Ane Information and Book of Articles were submitted to the commissioners at Westminster.13 An anonymous letter published ‘concernyng the credit of the late published detection of doyinges of the Ladie Marie of Scotland’ indicates that the Detectiovn was written by Buchanan as part of this project of preparing materials incriminating to Mary: it was written ‘accordyng to the Instructions to hym geven by common Conference of the Lordes of the Privie Counsel of Scotland, by him onely for hys learnyng penned, but by them the Mater ministred, the booke overseen & allowed’.14 The Detectiovn was an important text in what J.E. Phillips has described as the Elizabethan policy of ‘semi-publicity’ towards Mary – the unofficial production and circulation of material damaging to Mary’s reputation, which could be officially disclaimed as unauthorized under the terms of Elizabeth’s proclamation, implemented in 1569, against the importing of unlawful books without the sanction of ‘Seen and Allowed’. The proclamation was made in response to pamphlets attacking Mary that were assumed to have been published abroad, but that in fact had been produced in England with the knowledge of the government. This policy allowed Elizabeth to maintain the principle of inviolate royal sovereignty, while undermining Mary’s status as claimant to the English succession and as Catholic religious champion.15 As Anne McLaren has shown, in the parliamentary debates of 1571–72 Elizabeth was under considerable pressure from Parliament and her courtly advisers to judge Mary as a traitor and execute her; but instead she resisted their consensus, in part as an assertion of her political autonomy, in favour of a policy of ‘mercy’ towards her cousin.16 This mercy, however, did not allow Mary to exist as an unregulated agent in the English state, and Elizabeth acted against her through the more subtle means of propaganda. As part of this process, William Cecil was involved in encouraging the dissemination of early editions of the Detectiovn through France as part of Elizabethan foreign policy discouraging French support for Mary; he notes that ‘it were not amiss to have divers of Buchanan’s little Latin books to present, if needs were, to the King of France, and likewise to some noblemen of the Council’.17 The casket sonnets were first circulated therefore as part of a text that worked for the propaganda purposes of multiple groups: the Scottish lords for whom Buchanan prepared the

Generating Absence: The Sonnets of Mary Stuart 45

text; the Reformed party who published through Robert Lekprevik; the English Protestant cause who published through John Daye; and Elizabeth, in her policy of semi-publicity against Mary. Elizabeth’s deployment of Mary Stuart’s sonnets provides a counterpoint to her circulation and use of her own poetic texts, and the recovery of the casket sonnets and the history of their dissemination reconfigures current accounts of the textual relationship of Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. Philippa Berry has offered a more complex model of representation of Elizabeth than Frances Yates’ image of the ‘imperial virgin’, identified as unique and marked by her difference from other women. In Berry’s seminal argument, this representation of Elizabeth is supplemented with a second version of the cult, which represents Elizabeth as a woman in retention of her powers and surrounded and identified with other women. The second and feminized version of the cult of Elizabeth received increasing attention in later Elizabethan texts. It served to displace Elizabeth’s political and spiritual power with power in the private sphere, as signified by her chastity – her power over her own body.18 In this context of an alignment of autonomous, inviolate political power and chastity, the circulation of the disclosures of adulterous sexuality in the casket sonnets (the first of the casket sonnets contains the confession at lines 5–6: ‘Helas, is he nat already in possession / of my bodie’19) became a strategy for reinforcing Elizabeth’s own political power. Moreover, this circulation pointed to a difference of stability between the political states of Scotland and England. This strategy is reflected not only in Elizabeth’s policies of the dissemination of the casket sonnets, but in her own poetry. ‘The dowbt off future foes exiles my present joye’ was composed around 1570, and relates to the ambitions of Mary Queen of Scots towards the English throne in the 1560s; it received extensive manuscript circulation before its publication in The Arte of English Poesie in 1589. The means of Elizabeth’s initial dissemination of her text in the semi-private arena of manuscript circulation contrasted strongly with her encouragement of the circulation of Mary’s casket sonnets in print. Elizabeth’s text expresses the object of the speaker’s fears in general terms in its first ten lines, until at line 21 it specifies the speaker’s female rival with regard to the discourses circulating around her: The daughter of debate That discord aye doth sow Shall reap no gain where former rule Still peace hath taught to know.20

46 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

In characterizing Mary as the ‘daughter of debate’ and linking her with the sowing of ‘discord’, the text characterizes the rival queen in the image of a political instability crucially associated with the proliferation of discourse. Even before the publication of the casket sonnets, much of the debate surrounding Mary’s rule centred on her choice of sexual partner and the resultant shifts of power within the Scottish court – a disorder contrasted to the peace, reason and wisdom with which Elizabeth characterized her own chaste rule within the poem. It is a contrast made again in Elizabeth’s publication of books of prayers in 1569 and 1571, in which, as Kevin Sharpe indicates, she promoted herself as ‘good prince’, stable governor and mediator of God’s word.21 A separate history of Elizabeth’s manipulation of the modes of textual circulation in manuscript and print as a means of producing competing and self-authorizing versions of feminine sovereignty therefore preceded her public staging of her relationship with Mary Queen of Scots in print in the Arte of Englishe Poetry in 1589. As Summit shows, Elizabeth’s entry into print as sovereign lyric poet, who in Puttenham’s terms ‘easily surmounteth all the rest that haue written before her time or sence’, imported the covert strategies of manuscript circulation as a means of constructing a feminine sovereign identity in print.22 Yet Elizabeth’s continued representation of limitation and restriction as markers of value, allowing her to produce herself as better poet and better queen, is informed by a competitive textual dynamic generated 18 years earlier. This was a calculated rivalry enacted not just at the level of rhetoric, as Summit suggests, but through material practices of textual circulation that ultimately changed the shape of women’s secular writing in England.

The politics of absence: The casket sonnets and the feminine erotic lyric The success of the casket sonnets as Protestant propaganda rests not only upon the unregulated public circulation of Mary Stuart’s voice, but also on the internal detail of the sonnets themselves. Although the sequence opens by borrowing from penitential meditation, with an invocation to the gods, and formally signals itself as a sonnet sequence, it participates primarily in the genre of complaint. The female complaint is constructed around the dilated subjectivity of the female plainant who speaks from a position of abuse, but who nevertheless makes a case for the return of her beloved’s affections.23 It offers a subject position of weakness and dependency, and a prioritizing of the

Generating Absence: The Sonnets of Mary Stuart 47

personal and emotional that becomes terrifyingly irresponsible in the voice of a sovereign. A central trope of the complaint is the plainant’s recruitment of discourses of virtue and sacrifice to her often culturally marginalized position. In the casket sonnets, the subject’s relinquishment of honour, friends and family is made hyperbolic by reference to her position as queen. Sonnet 2 begins: In his handis and in his full power, I put my sonne, my honour, and my lyif, My contry, my subiects, my soule al subdewit, To him, and has none vther will. (R3r) The generic demands of complaint combined with the speaker’s selfconstruction as a woman sovereign through the specific reference to ‘my subiects’ has the effect here of reinforcing discourses such as John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet, which present women’s political rule as a nightmare of instability. The text’s focus on the private identity of the speaker has profoundly political consequences, and can be read as a gloss upon the failures of Mary Stuart’s political rule as arising from her erotic alliances within the Scottish court. These alliances, in a court divided by factions and clan loyalties, are problematized by the gender of the sovereign precisely for the reasons dramatized in the sequence – that marriage for a woman sovereign involves the relinquishment of political and religious power to uncertain hands, a power that determines the fate of the state’s subjects and that delineates succession.24 However, these contingencies associated with female sovereignty also mean that the sequence exceeded the propaganda purposes for which it was deployed. In this sense, the sequence works also as a comment upon Elizabeth’s own rule. Following the turbulence of Mary Tudor’s Catholic reign, Elizabeth’s active and potentially successful marriage negotiations during the 1560s had threatening consequences for the Protestant Scottish noblemen circulating the sonnets. In response to the uncertainty and fear generated by the prospect of a new sovereign by marriage, the dissemination of the sequence may have a second propaganda purpose as a comment on women’s sovereignty in general and as an admonitory warning to Elizabeth in particular. The text might be positioned as a comment on Elizabeth’s own rule through its stress on the speaker’s constancy, which was a trope of the complaint and which could be viewed in the light of Elizabeth’s use of ‘Semper Eadem’ as her motto in her youth. The casket sonnets recruit the notion of constancy in a woman ruler to the sphere of private erotic

48 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

exchange. In this way, they make explicit the political consequences of such a shift, and destabilize Elizabeth’s parallel recruitment of erotic discourse to the public sphere in her own political rhetoric of constancy. By highlighting specific textual practices recruited by Elizabeth in maintaining her political stability, the sequence underlines the contingency of political stability in feminine hands. The text can be seen to exceed Elizabeth’s propaganda purposes to question the terms of feminine sovereignty itself.25 The circulation history of the casket sonnets works both to support and to limit the terms in which Elizabeth’s sovereign and textual identities might be constructed. Further, this history remains the ground upon which her poetic production of identity is staged as late as 1589, two years after Mary’s death finally allowed Elizabeth’s entry as sovereign poet into the medium of print that she had damagingly assigned to her rival. In the same way as the particular circulation history of the casket sonnets both limits and grounds the terms of Elizabeth’s textual agency as sovereign, their widespread and scandalous circulation closes off a set of possible textual strategies for other women writers in the period at the same time as the text makes such possibilities visible. To a reader working with late Elizabethan and Jacobean women’s writing, the sequence appears startlingly unfamiliar. Its unframed feminine speaker is an adulterous mistress seeking to prove her constant love for her beloved, first in terms of self-renunciation and abjection and then through an erotic and textual rivalry with his wife. More than this, the sequence juxtaposes a Petrarchan rhetoric of unfulfilled desire with destabilizing instances of concrete narrative detail. For example, in sonnet 5 the speaker juxtaposes familiar tropes of Petrarchan desire with catty criticisms of her rival’s clothing, commentary on appropriate wifely behaviour and a sarcastic take on her rival’s sincerity: Quhen you louit hyr sche vsit coldnesse, Gif you suffrith for hir luif passioun, That commith of to greit affectioun of luif, Hyr sadnes schew the tristesse of hyr hart, Taking na pleasure of your veheme[n]t burning, In hyr clothing she schew vnfaynitly, That sche had na feir, that imperfection Could deface hyr out of that true hart. I did not see in hyr the feir of your death, That was worthy of sic husband and Lord. Schortly sche hath of you all hyr wealth.

Generating Absence: The Sonnets of Mary Stuart 49

And hath neuer weyit nor estemit One so greit hap, but sins it was nat hirs, And now she saith that she loueth him so well. (R3v) These juxtapositions seem unsettling because of their unfamiliarity, but are produced by the text’s generic conflation of the familiar strategies of the Petrarchan sonnet sequence with the genre of complaint. John Kerrigan represents the complaint’s operation in two intersecting modes in the period: one elegaic, in which a rhetoric of abandonment is used to lament a past betrayal, where loss is irrecoverable; and one satiric, a mode in which loss is recoverable. This satiric mode is linked to the genre’s legal antecedents and outlines a wrong to be redressed.26 The casket sonnets belong to the second category. They mix elements of story and lament in their presentation of a section of narrative outlining the events that have given rise to the plaint. This is a move typical of the hybridity of the genre, which is informed in the Renaissance by a diverse mixture of secular, spiritual, popular and courtly traditions. Although the speaking subject of the complaint genre is characterized by a flexible assignation of gender, and in the Ovidian tradition is often feminine, it is a genre which, like the Petrarchan sonnet sequence, has been assumed until very recently to be unavailable to early modern women writers. John Kerrigan’s seminal anthology Motives of Woe contains no complaints authored by Renaissance women. However, at least two women wrote and circulated complaints in print: Isabella Whitney with The Copy of a Letter in 1567 and A Sweet Nosegay in 1573; and 48 years later in 1621, Mary Wroth with her collection of female complaints in the prose text of the Urania.27 Wroth’s text also marks the first circulation of a sonnet sequence in print by a woman writer in the Renaissance after the circulation of the casket sonnets in 1571. It is a curious gap, especially as the sonnet sequence and the complaint became primary lyric genres for male authors in the late Elizabethan period. My argument here is that this absence is not caused by women’s inability to negotiate the gender encodings of these genres, which is the current critical orthodoxy. Indeed, this frequently rehearsed position is itself contested by the presence of these early complaints and sequences written by women in the 1560s.28 Instead, I argue here that the circulation of the forgotten text of the casket sonnets was a key factor leading to this lacuna. The defamatory effect generated by its circulation as propaganda worked together with a set of cultural limitations upon women’s entry into the public sphere to close off the very possibilities that these early erotic lyrics present to the early modern woman writer. These

50 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

cultural limitations linked particular genres when practised by women to sexual promiscuity and the defamation of character, and they had a specific effect upon the lyric agency of historical women subjects; by contrast, as the next chapter indicates, the secular lyric was not closed off to male writers publishing under a feminine signature. However, the two genres employed by the casket sonnets, complaint and sonnet sequence, were not practised again in print by English women writers for half a century. Thus the unfamiliarity of the casket sonnets partly arises because it is an example of feminine generic combination never again repeated: an emergent lyric mode immediately foreclosed. In terms of the specific English lyric tradition of the 1560s, however, the casket sonnets’ combination of complaint and Petrarchan sonnet sequence circulated under a feminine signature is an unsurprising one. The year 1567 marked a resurgence of interest in the complaint, with the publication of George Turberville’s translation of Ovid’s Heroides, a series of epistolary complaints in the voices of key classical figures such as Penelope, Dido and Helen of Troy. The narratives of this group of women provided a range of examples of virtue and vice and included feminine rulers.29 The generic examples of Turberville’s translation are taken up almost immediately in Whitney’s The Copy of a Letter, in which the feminine speaker uses selected histories from the Heroides as instructive examples of unfaithfulness, in her suit to regain her lover’s favour. She argues: For they, for their unfaithfulnes, did get perpetuall fame: Fame? wherfore dyd I terme it so? I should have cald it shame.30 (A3v) Whitney’s poem goes on to recruit the virtues of selected Ovidian plainants to her case, arguing that ‘save Helen’s beauty, al the rest / the Gods have me assigned’, in sharp distinction to their absence in her rival. As Danielle Clarke argues, The Copy of a Letter overwrites the Heroidean tradition with a tradition of popular Tudor adaptations of complaint, directed to a critique of social and economic forces, to produce a new generic form tied to the pursuit of personal self-interest through the textual generation of good character.31 Lawrence Manley argues that the writers of Tudor complaint realigned a whole system of tropes to accommodate the rapid social and economic changes particularly emergent in London, developing the tropes of inversion, catalogue and list as satiric devices representing a world where order had become arbitrary and specious.32 They are tropes adapted in Whitney’s text to the arena of erotic love, where poetry

Generating Absence: The Sonnets of Mary Stuart 51

becomes, as Lorna Hutson has argued, a commodity of exchange in the pursuit of a store of personal credit.33 The Copy of a Letter’s catalogues of virtue and vice, its personalized competition with a rival for the beloved, and its anxious presentation of the speaker’s ‘worth’ in an erotic economy outside traditional structures of marriage produce the elements of prosaic self-interest that begin to characterize Tudor imitation of Heroidian complaint. And it is these elements that are almost exactly reproduced in the casket sonnets first circulated in manuscript one year later. The casket sonnets are directed from their beginning to a project of local self-interest: they work to establish ‘certaine profe’ of the speaker’s love as a means of winning her lover’s favour, through a catalogue of the speaker’s sacrifices and constancy in love, as against her rival’s avarice, self-interest and inconstancy. The speaker even recruits her marginal position as mistress to this end, in sonnet 3 claiming that her rival’s false professions of love are prompted by the benefits of legitimacy, her husband’s property and status, in contrast to her own authentic and unrewarded affection: Sche for hyr honour oweth you obedience: I in obaying you may receiue dishonour, Nat being (to my displesure) your wife as she. And yit in this poynt she shall haue na preheminence. Sche useth constancy for hyr awin profite: For it is na little honour to be maistres of your goodes, And I for luifing of you may receiue blame, And will nat be ouercumme by hyr in loyall obseruaunce. Sche has no apprehension of your euyll, I feare so all appearing euill that I can haue na rest. Sche had your acqueintance by consent of hyr freindes, I against al thair will haue borne you affectio[n]. And nat the lesse (my hart) you doubt of my constance, And of hir faithfulnes you haif firme assura[n]ce. (R3r) The list forms the dominant rhetorical trope of the poem, operating both within lines – ‘My hart, my bloud, my soule, my care’ – and as an organizing structural principle within individual sonnets, linking and dividing octets, quatrains and sestets. One of multiple examples occurs at Sonnet 8: For him I attend all gude fortune For him I will conserue health and life For him I desire to ensew courage And he shall euer finde me vnchangeable. (R4v)

52 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

These taxonomies produce a simultaneous effect of excess and anxiety, constancy and change. This effect is reinforced by the final suspension of the lover’s repeatedly invoked judgement at the sequence’s close, which returns to the speaker’s act of writing – ‘I put my hand to the paper to write’ – in a typically Ovidian move that works to reinforce the undecidability of the speaker’s case. The casket sonnets further complicate the generic cues they send to a reader by overwriting the new generic form of Tudor–Ovidian imitation with a second emergent genre, that of the Petrarchan sonnet sequence: this sense of endless reiteration within a closed economy is a familiar Petrarchan trope. In England in 1567, the genre of complaint was arguably more developed than the sonnet sequence. Although individual examples of English Petrarchan sonnets had been widely circulated from 1557 in Tottel’s Miscellany, sonnets in the English tradition had appeared in the form of a sequence only once, in the paraphrase of the 51st Psalm concluding Anne Lock’s 1560 text. By mixing elements of spiritual complaint with the Petrarchan sonnet sequence and employing the genderless lyric ‘I’ as speaking subject, the 1560 Meditation generated a set of possibilities available to the writer of the casket sonnets for the assumption of a feminine subject position within these genres. The suggestive example of the generic combination of complaint and sonnet in the 1560 psalm paraphrase thus became available to a secular context in the late 1560s through the models provided by Ovid’s Heroides and Whitney’s Tudor imitation. This generic combination opened up a new space for the feminine erotic subject, one that reconfigured both of the genres in which it participates. Sarah Dunnigan also notes that the sonnets ‘imitate the literary and rhetorical tropes of the midRenaissance Ovidian female voice’ and that they combine ‘Petrarchistic and Neo-Platonic discourses’. However, she finds this imitation ‘superficial’ and associates the sonnets’ ‘eclectic and insubstantial’ discursive combinations with a textual incoherence that contributes to arguments for the text’s incompetence and forgery.34 The importance of the Ovidian signals that the text provides are possibly overlooked in Dunnigan’s analysis because she locates the sonnets in a Continental tradition of women’s Petrarchan erotic poetry, that of Louise Labe´, Pernette du Guillet and Gaspara Stampa; this forms part of her project to restore the sonnets as an important text within a canon of Scottish literature closely linked to a Continental rather than an English poetic tradition. Yet in removing the casket sonnets from the English literary and political context in which they were in part printed and circulated,

Generating Absence: The Sonnets of Mary Stuart 53

and possibly even produced, the clarifying set of precedents located in the genre of Tudor complaint is obscured, as are the sonnets’ generic innovations.35 Thus Dunnigan puzzles over the casket sonnets’ interest in materiality, an interest she finds lacking in the work of the Continental women’s erotic tradition: ‘the dynamic between self-renunciation and self-identification can certainly be perceived in the erotic writing of other early modern women poets (Pernette du Guillet’s, for example) but its intellectual and emotional associations seem to lack the apparently ‘‘material’’ consequences which Marian eros claims to defy’.36 It is precisely this interest in the material world that is imported into the sequence from female complaint; rather than representing ‘the possibility of textual corruption or interference’ or a new form of erotic sovereign subjectivity radically different from that practised by either Elizabeth or James, the ‘material’ here represents the results of an unfamiliar generic combination. In a sense, Sarah Dunnigan and I are both arguing that the casket sonnets are a pivotal text in the Renaissance conceptualization of feminine erotic desire in the lyric. But where she locates the text’s importance in its thematic and poetic innovation, its construction of a ‘new morality and a new poetics of desire’, my argument finds the text’s innovation at the level of genre and lyric agency and attributes its perceived differences and incoherence to the results of a generic combination that is itself unfamiliar.37 Most significantly, the casket sonnets import into Tudor complaint a new interest in textuality absent from both the Heroides and Whitney’s complaints, newly constructing the speaker’s rivalry with the beloved’s wife in terms of Petrarchan textual competition: And now sche beginneth to see, That sche was of veray euill iugement, To esteeme the loue of sic ane louer, And wald fayne deceiue my loue, By writinges and paintit learning, Quhilk nat the lesse did not breid in hir braine, But borrowit from sum feate authour, To fayne one sturt and haif none. And for all that hyr payntit wordis, Hyr teares, hyr plaintes full of dissimulation, And hyr hye cryes and lamentations Hath won that poynt, that you keip in store, Hir letters and writinges, to quhilk you geif trust, Ye, and louest and beleuist hyr more than me. (R3v–R4r)

54 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

However, the generic pressure of the complaint, in which legal antecedents generate a self-conscious concern with creating believable fictions, means that here the point of rivalry between the speaker’s poetic performance and that of the wife centred not on a Petrarchan assertion of poetic virtuosity, but on the authenticity and reception of their respective discourses. The rival’s work is characterized by its double falsity: it is both plagiarism – ‘borrowit from sum feate authour’ – and emotionally inauthentic – ‘her plaints full of dissimulation’. It is inviting to read the text’s engagement with questions of truth and falsehood refracted through textual dissimulation as evidence for its own inauthenticity. But this reading implies an anxiety about reception that feeds back into the unresolvable attribution debates, suggesting that the text was written to be widely circulated, and anticipating arguments for its forgery. Rather than again limiting the text’s interpretative possibilities to these debates, I would like to suggest that its concern with authenticity arises from the pressures of a particular generic combination of complaint and sonnet. Further, this combination of lyric possibilities emerges at a specific historical moment when the field of women’s poetry was surprisingly open. The history of women’s deployment of secular lyric forms in the 1560s and early 1570s suggests that the field offered a range of genres, topoi and speaking positions to the female subject. In its engagement with the question of feminine textual rivalry, this sequence registers an active scene of women’s writing and circulation of texts as a means of secular self-presentation; a scene that has a historical counterpart in the complicated history of the circulation of texts under the signatures of Elizabeth and Mary in the early 1570s. However, this moment of feminine secular lyric agency is fleeting: apart from Whitney’s 1573 complaints, the genres of the complaint and sonnet sequence are not circulated by women writers in print for almost 50 years until Mary Wroth’s unfashionably late sonnet sequences and complaints of 1621. There are, however, manuscript exceptions of women’s use of Petrarchism, and the Petrarchan sonnet, in the years following the circulation of the casket sonnets. Although none are sonnets, Elizabeth I composed a number of Petrarchan lyrics between 1572 and 1587, and sections of Petrarch’s I Trionfi were translated by a number of women writers in the period, including Elizabeth, Mary Sidney and Anna Hume. Manuscript copies of English women’s translations of Petrarchan sonnets also exist, most notably in the translations of Elizabeth Carey Berkeley of two Petrarchan sonnets, probably as part of her Italian tuition in 1594.38 Finally, Jamie Reid-Baxter has recently discovered 14 sonnets among the 29 lyrics appearing in a manuscript

Generating Absence: The Sonnets of Mary Stuart 55

volume of sermons by Robert Bruce, which he attributes to Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross.39 In England, at least one other woman, however, does circulate original sonnets in manuscript following the publication of the casket sonnets: Mary Stuart. Apart from the secular sonnet sent to Elizabeth in 1568 discussed by Jennifer Summit, she sends a verse meditation and sonnet to the Bishop of Ross in 1573, published by Ross in Piae Afflicti Animi Consolationes, and a pair of sonnets, followed by a 10-line lyric, to Ronsard in the early 1580s.40 If the impact of the casket sonnets is such as to problematize women’s participation in the sonnet sequence as a genre, Mary Stuart has a particular political investment in circulating sonnets herself in manuscript. In doing so, she reclaims control of both the generic form of the sonnet and the modes of textual circulation that have done her personal and political reputation such damage.

The devotional sonnets The sonnet published in Piae Afflicti Animi Consolationes, ‘L’ire de Dieu’, and the pair of devotional sonnets circulated in manuscript in the 1580s, provide a rare sixteenth-century English example of the use of the sonnet as a genre by a historical woman writer following the publication and widespread circulation of the casket sonnets. As such, they are significant texts in this generic literary history, and exemplify some of the strategies which other female authors might have used in negotiating the gender encodings of the genre. Yet even these poems are constrained by the dynamics set up by the casket sonnets; particularly evident in the pair of sonnets circulated a decade later, when the full impact of the circulation of the casket sonnets for the woman writer had taken effect. Most notable among these constraints are the complex strategies of subordination and negotiation of the secular aspects of the genre in its combination with penitential meditation and an ambivalent construction of subjectivity. The later sonnets not only assert the lyric I’s subordination to God’s will and direction, but also recruit that subordination to a project of establishing personal worth that is very close to the strategies of complaint, and work to both renovate the speaker’s personal reputation and posit her exemplarity in faith and suffering to her followers as part of a wider political project pursued by Mary Stuart during her imprisonment. Thematically, and in their diction, the later pair of sonnets are very close to the meditation and sonnet written by and published by the Bishop of Ross in 1574. The first sonnet of the pair begins with a representation of

56 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

the speaker’s frailty, in line with ll. 56–65 of the Meditation of 1574, and concludes with a sestet calling for God’s entry into the speaker’s heart. This desire for divine redemption of the heart is represented metaphorically through the image of grace in the final couplet of the 1574 sonnet ‘L’Ire de Dieu par le sang ne s’appaise’: ‘tousiours ces graces dans mon cœur / Puissant rester a` ta gloire & honneur’. The image of the heart, as a site of frailty, redemption and finally as proof of the speaker’s exemplary faith, is the structuring metaphor of the 1580 sonnets: o seigneur Dieu receuez ma priere Qui est selon ta sainte voulonte Car si’il ne playt a ta grand mageste Je defendray a la demi carriere Elas signeur ie retourne en arriere lasse desia si ta grande bonte ne renforcit ma fraile voulonte De ta vertu a franchir la barriere Tu veusx Signeur estre maitre du cueur Viens donc signeur & y fays ta demeure pour en chasser l’amour & la rancueur le bien le mal mostant tout soing & cure fors seulement de paruenir a toy penitament en constance & en foy. Donnes seigneur dones moy pasciance & renforces ma trop debile foy que ton esprit me condisuse en ta loy & me guardes de choir par imprudance Donee signeur donne moy la constance en bien & mal & la perseuerance reduis en toy toute mon esperance & hors du cueur moste tout vaynes moy Ne permets plus d’au monde remasuisi mays tout plesir fors en toy ie refuse Deliures moy de toutes passions dire dereur & de tout autre vice & prouois moy de doulceur & iustice dun cueur deuot & sayntes actions.41 The devotional cast of this pair of sonnets is also consistent with Mary’s self-presentation during her captivity. The 1574 verse meditation and

Generating Absence: The Sonnets of Mary Stuart 57

sonnet on sacrifice reflect a strategy of reinventing her public image in terms of religious piety. This strategy served both as a corrective to the Protestant dissemination of the casket sonnets and as a means of reinforcing her status as Catholic martyr, a focus for Catholic sympathies. Mary used a poetics of piety as a means of strengthening her support in England and abroad, in France and Spain. This project was revived in the 1580s, first with the composition of the ‘Essay on Adversity’ in 1580, a text that positions itself as overtly political in the speaker’s claim of expertise in the area of the ‘diuersity of human afflictions and the various accidents of mortal life’ and in her motivation – to avoid indolence ‘now that I am depriued of the means of exercising the charge to which God called me in my cradle’. The essay attributes the speaker’s misfortune to divine wrath, and her only remedy lies ‘in turning to God’. Affliction is represented as ‘a furnace to fine gold’, a means of positioning the speaker as martyr: ‘that I may be worthy to be named with those sufferers, who haue willingly carried their crosses in this world’.42 The emphasis on affliction and its strengthening of faith corresponds to a period in England when Catholics were increasingly represented as dangerous to the state and were suffering persecution, culminating in the Act of Persuasions of 1581 by which it was declared that reconciliation to the Catholic faith was high treason. The essay recruits persecution and suffering to the consolidation of faith, exemplary strategies for the Catholic community facing increasing affliction in England. By 1583, the discovery of the Throckmorton plot, in which Mary was implicated in plans for the Spanish invasion of England, was used by Walsingham as a means to represent Mary as a dangerous woman, the focus of the vilified Catholic community.43 In this context, her composition of pious meditations calling for God’s strength and protection worked to recruit the deity to the support of Catholic religion, as well as presenting the speaker’s piety in the face of slander. However, the second sonnet of the pair presents the speaker’s faults in oddly incriminating terms in the light of the Throckmorton plot: ‘Deliures moy de toutes passions / dire dereur & de tout autre vice.’ This initially suggests that the sonnets were not intended for public circulation in England, at least; but the placement of an additional sonnet to Ronsard on the same page as the second sonnet of the sequence suggests that the group of poems may have been intended for circulation in France, as a means of raising and renovating Mary’s damaged profile in the French court through a conduit other than the ambassador James Beaton, with whom Mary was having some difficulty by 1583. Alternatively, the sonnets may have been intended

58 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

to play some part in Mary’s plans from early 1581 until October 1584 for her return to Scotland, involving the institution of an ‘association’, or joint rule of mother and son.44 Mary’s negotiations for this alliance involved extensive revision of her former position, and the concessions she offered in return for her release included the relinquishment of any claim to the English throne and an amnesty over all wrongs suffered by her under Elizabeth’s reign.45 The pair of sonnets under examination may be part of this process of concession, a poetic counterpart to the casket sonnets that conceded, obliquely, past vice, anger and error. The dynamic of request and gift, and the familiarity of the speaker’s relationship with God in the sonnets, places them within the meditative tradition of colloquy. The conclusion of the meditative process, the colloquy is an address performed ‘by speaking as one friend speaks to another, or as a servant to his master; at one time asking for some favour, at another blaming oneself for some evil committed, now informing him of one’s affairs, and seeking counsel in them’.46 Both sonnets in the 1583 pair display a tension between subordination and familiarity. God is repeatedly addressed both as ‘signeur’ and as ‘tu’; the first sonnet opens with the formal address and verb form – ‘o signeur Dieu resceuez ma priere’ – but breaks down into the use of the familiar in the second line – ‘ta sainte voulonte’. This instability parallels the movement of the sonnet itself between self-assertion in defiance of God and submission to his will in the opening octave. The speaker’s assertion of the worth of her prayer for God’s reception and her defence of its value in the first quatrain is countered by a selfanalysis in the second, which backtracks – ‘ie retourne en arriere’ – to emphasize the speaker’s weakness of will and fatigue, and her desire for divine virtue as a means of overcoming: ‘De ta vertu a franchir la barriere.’ The octave dramatizes the process of resistance and capitulation to God’s will as a preliminary to the resolutions of the sestet, where the speaker offers her heart to God and in this process writes both her own body and will from the text. The only subjective assertion of this second section lies in the speaker’s assumption of God’s will at line 9: ‘Tu veusx Signeur estre maitre du cueur’; but it is a very qualified assertion in its compliance with God’s will. The remainder of the sestet contains no reference to the speaker in its pronouns: her heart is represented as a neutral object, ‘du cueur’; her emotions and experiences as objective and generalized states, ‘l’amour & la rancueur / le bien le mal’; and her actions in the impersonal form of the infinitive ‘paruenir’.

Generating Absence: The Sonnets of Mary Stuart 59

Viens donc signeur & y fays ta demeure pour en chasser l’amour & la rancueur le bien le mal mostant tout soing & cure fors seulement de paruenir a toy penitament en constance & en foy. This neutralizing of the speaker’s subject position is marked in the text’s corrections: the speaker’s active position of returning God’s victory to him in the original tenth line – ‘Mays sans toy ie ne puis ten randre le veinceur’ – is replaced with the speaker’s offering of her body as the place of his dwelling. Similarly, the final line’s neutral ‘en constance & en foy’ replaces ‘et constante en ma foy’. The speaker effaces her own subjectivity beneath that of God, but in this subordination the sonnet takes on a general application. At the moment of the subject’s renunciation of private will, the subject position relinquished is filled with the model of God’s will, and the sonnet turns outward, to perform a public and exemplary function. The second sonnet moves from the resolutions of the final couplet of the first sonnet to a reassertion of the speaker’s human frailty. This movement entails a shift from the emphasis on self-effacement in the first sonnet to a replacement of the subject at the centre of the text in the second. The second sonnet takes the form of a compilation of petitions for divine gifts which is at first general, but takes on an increasing specificity in its application to the speaker. The sonnet’s references to the use of these gifts – ‘me guardes de choir par imprudance’, ‘Deliures moy de toutes passions / dire dereur & de tout autre vice’ – seem to buy into the constructions placed upon the figure of Mary Stuart during the trials of 1568 and her subsequent imprisonment: as an impassioned woman who has given in to anger and vice, revealed most damagingly in the casket materials. But the sonnet repeats these representations only to renovate them, by placing them in the frame of ordinary human frailty that can be redeemed by God, and by representing the fall of the speaker as the result of ‘imprudence’ rather than wrong or evil action. In this, the sonnet works on both private and public levels, by recruiting other textual discourses to a private and meditative purpose and reworking them in this religious context for their release as a strategy of defence in circles of textual exchange. The sonnet’s interest in establishing personal credit here also recalls the intersection of complaint and Petrarchism in the casket sonnets, here deflected through the frame of devotional meditation. Thus the dynamic of the sequence is to represent the speaker as entered by God and working in accordance with his purposes in the first sonnet and then, while maintaining that state at heart – ‘& hors du cueur

60 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

moste tout vaynes moy’ – to emphasize the power of God to redeem past error. The second sonnet’s politics are obscured behind the subject’s statements of refusal of the world for God. Indeed, the repetition of ‘tout’ in the sestet exaggerates the extent of this refusal: mays tout plesir fors en toy ie refuse Deliures moy de toutes passions dire dereur & de tout autre vice All this leads again to the ‘cueur deuot’ concluding the first sonnet, and this circularity functions as another assertion of the sequence’s private frame and denial of its politics. However, the second sonnet finishes not with the heart but with a desire for ‘sayntes actions’, indicating its concern with the public operation or activism of that renovated heart. Mary Stuart’s circulation of a pair of sonnets in manuscript in the 1580s again challenges the assumption that the absence of women writers from the genre of the sonnet sequence arose from the gender encodings inherent in their generic structures. The circulation of these sonnets also challenges the much-rehearsed set of cultural prescriptions limiting women’s entry into the public sphere and associating their textual circulation with a similar sexual circulation. As the circulation histories of these sequences show, these are monolithic constructions of the relationship between gender, genre and textual circulation. Indeed, when applied generally to the field of Renaissance women’s writing, these constructions mask a set of different, locally specific relationships of gender and genre operating in different configurations at specific points in the period. The examples of sonnets either written by or attributed to Mary Stuart do not show women’s absolute exclusion from the genres of the sonnet sequence and complaint through an inability to negotiate certain gender encodings. Rather, the history of the casket sonnets particularly indicates that any lack of participation in the genre in the medium of print arose from the specific circulation history of one widely read but critically disregarded sequence, which altered the direction of women’s writing in the period. Considered outside unresolvable questions of attribution, the casket sonnets mark a point in the literary field where the set of possibilities for the construction of feminine subjectivity in print are at their most open and inventive, and are almost instantly closed off. The impact of this text upon the field of early modern women’s poetry indicates a need to rethink prevailing models of gender and signature in terms of a new, historically specific attention to texts of uncertain attribution.

3 The Politics of Prosopopoeia: The Pandora Sonnets

The previous chapters have analyzed the impact that two texts of disputed attribution had upon the field of early modern women’s writing, and most specifically upon women writers’ agency in the genre of the secular lyric. If these histories indicate surprising instances of textual innovation in the field of female writing in the 1560s and 1570s, they also indicate the problems of defining that field solely in terms of historical women writers and texts of secure attribution. Separating the categories of female authorship, female writing and female voice newly allows texts of uncertain attribution to be analyzed within the field of early modern women’s textual practice, reconfiguring its boundaries and altering the ways in which the feminine lyric agency in the genres of sonnet and complaint might be understood. Another such difficult text of uncertain attribution is a third collection of sonnets circulated in print in 1584 in John Soowthern’s Pandora and attributed in the text to Anne de Vere, Countess of Oxford, followed by a single sonnet attributed in the text to Elizabeth I.1 The recent critical history of this text exemplifies one set of difficulties that texts of problematic authorship cause in the field of early modern women’s writing: in this case, the consequences of strained and selective arguments for feminine attribution. In 1990, Ellen Moody published the first contemporary article to discuss the Pandora sonnets in detail: ‘Six Elegaic Poems, Possibly by Anne Cecil de Vere, Countess of Oxford’. This essay belies its tentative title by arguing strongly for the attribution to Anne de Vere on the grounds of biography, internal evidence – a perceived difference between the separately attributed poems – and her reading of a tradition of earlier criticism. Although Moody accepts some metrical and tropological similarities between all the poems, she identifies a ‘startling 61

62 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

contrast’ in mood and character between the sonnets attributed to John Soowthern and those attributed to Anne de Vere, and a ‘strong difference’ between the de Vere and Elizabeth sonnets. She attributes the sonnets to Anne de Vere on the grounds of these perceived differences, biography and the support of ‘earlier scholars’: the late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century critics Steevens, Walpole, Park and Dyce.2 Moody’s unproblematic use of eighteenth-century critics in making the attribution demonstrates the epistemological debt her approach has to this period. Her debt is also evident in her privileging of the private, her assumption of an unmediated relationship between author and textual subject that justifies biographical readings, and her promotion of a concept of an unchanging female response to consistent experiences such as birth and death that transcend local histories. This lack of analysis weakens the project of recuperation and attribution of the poems because it blinds the critic to certain questions, and makes unfounded speculations arising from specific and different historical circumstances appear natural. Moody’s attribution has been questioned in an article by Steven May that points to substantial technical similarities between Soowthern’s highly unconventional style and that of the poems attributed to Anne de Vere and Elizabeth, as well as dissimilarities between Elizabeth’s Pandora sonnet and the remainder of her work. Soowthern’s poetry contains distinct technical anomalies for the period, and three of its most unusual features – arrhythmic metres, idiosyncratic principles of rhyming and abbreviated forms of proper nouns – can be located in all of the poems attributed to de Vere and Elizabeth in Pandora but not in any other late Elizabethan verse. Moody writes out these similarities by suggesting that Soowthern may have tampered with the ‘original manuscripts’ of Anne de Vere and Elizabeth, but May claims that Soowthern’s anomalous style is so manifest and consistent that any editing efforts on his part ‘transformed their work beyond recognition’. For the women themselves to have produced work so similar to Soowthern’s, both must have studied and imitated exactly his distinctive poetics; for Elizabeth, this would have meant taking up, and then abandoning without trace, a poetic practice at odds with the remainder of her verse. May goes on to reverse Moody’s attribution, claiming that the texts attributed to Anne de Vere and Elizabeth were both instances of the rhetorical strategy of prosopopoeia, the ascription of words or actions to an absent or imaginary figure, deployed by Soowthern in a bid for patronage. However, Louise Schleiner contests May’s claims in a resumption of the gynocritical feminist project of making the attribution of the

The Politics of Prosopopoeia: The Pandora Sonnets 63

sonnets to Anne de Vere. She argues that a prosopopoeia would be unlikely to consist of excerpts, and follows Moody in claiming that stylistic similarities with Soowthern’s work could have been the result of Soowthern’s editorial practice (especially if he had been the Countess of Oxford’s French tutor). Finally, she asserts that the specific features that May finds to be peculiar to Soowthern, transformed in Schleiner’s account to ‘his gallicisms of phrasing and diction, his practice of hyphenating across line endings to get exact syllable accounts in particular lines, and his failures with English syntax’, are materially absent from the sonnets ascribed to Anne de Vere. Unconvincingly, Schleiner distorts May’s argument in order to take issue with it, enlarging his identification of the trope of abbreviating proper nouns to the more general ‘gallicisms’, and reducing his complex account of Soowthern’s use of arrhythmic metre to the single instance of hyphenation across line endings. Her account of typical syntactic failures in Soowthern’s verse, absent in the Countess of Oxford’s poems, depends on rather selective quotation from some of the least successful of Soowthern’s poetry, which could be answered by an equally selective set of successful counter-examples. Most problematically, however, she fails to deal with the poem attributed to Elizabeth I in Pandora and its dissimilarity from the remainder of Elizabeth’s other poetry. An argument for the attribution in Pandora of the poems to the Countess of Oxford inevitably involves some consideration of the attribution of a very similar poem in the same text to Elizabeth. This occlusion suggests a sense of strain in Schleiner’s argument for attribution, reinforced by her reshaping of May’s article, and in defensive phrases such as ‘in a case of such unambiguous attribution, the burden of proof must be on those who would deny it’.3 However, the case made by Moody and Schleiner has been adopted without question in the most recent accounts of the collection: Kim Walker’s close reading of the elegies as ‘a challenging statement of maternal love’ and Nona Fienberg’s argument that Mary Wroth’s use of Anacreontic discourse and a dialogic method for exploring loss might be traced to the Pandora sonnets.4 Noting the absence of a disclaimer as further evidence for the sonnets’ authenticity, Marion Wynne-Davies reprints the sonnets as genuine, chastising the questioning of the attribution by contemporary critics as ‘somewhat overscrupulous’; she suggests that as so few poems of Anne de Vere are currently extant, ‘rather than questioning the authorship of those we do possess, perhaps we should be investigating manuscript material to find more’.5 There are other considerations that make the attribution of the Pandora sonnets to Anne de Vere possible, if still slightly improbable.

64 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

For example, some of the apparently unusual formal features of the collection may reflect an increasing dissemination of Continental poetic practice in England and a generic instability surrounding the sonnet in the 1580s rather than anomalies specific to Soowthern. The use of the French rhyme scheme with an internal couplet is not exclusive to the poems of Pandora, a factor that would have made the attribution of the whole text to Soowthern more likely. The circulation of the French sonnets attributed to Mary Stuart from 1571 and the presence of Ronsard at the English court increase the possibility that three separate writers should produce poems structured upon this model in 1584. Although the sonnet had begun to stabilize as a form by the mid1580s, the genre was still a site of experimentation, as instanced by Thomas Watson’s 18-line sonnets in Hekatompathia. Taking the widely circulated casket sonnets into account, it seems at least possible that a circle of experimentation with sonnets using a French rhyme scheme may have formed in the de Vere household in the mid-1580s. Marion Wynne-Davies suggests that as part of the reconciliation of Anne de Vere and Oxford in the 1580s, ‘Anne attempted to embrace the Euphuistic, quasi-Catholic style adopted by her husband, who was himself a poet, and by those writers to whom he offered patronage, including John Lyly, Thomas Watson and, of course, Soowthern.’6 Some familial precedent also exists for Anne de Vere’s publication of funeral elegies, located not with her husband Edward de Vere who wrote only one sonnet and no epitaphs or elegies, but with her parents William Cecil and Mildred Cooke Cecil.7 William Cecil’s poetic output was almost entirely funereal, and while none of his elegies were sonnets, he contributed to a memorial volume occasioned by the deaths of the Brandon brothers, which contained three elegies in sonnet form and was part of the Cecil library. Mildred Cecil, one of the textually prolific Cooke sisters and a translator herself, provided through her sister Elizabeth Hoby Russell a significant generic precedent for familial verse epitaph. Russell composed epitaphs in English and Latin for her first husband Sir Thomas Hoby, her brother-in-law Sir Philip Hoby, her neighbour Thomas Noke, and her daughters by Sir Thomas Hoby, and her later courtier verse included a Latin verse inscription following the death of her son Francis. However, it appears unlikely that the Pandora sonnets were attributed to Anne de Vere and Elizabeth I by a contemporary audience. 42 memorial epitaphs to Anne de Vere collected among the Cecil papers, but unpublished, generally refer to her virtue as a daughter and her fidelity as a wife, but make little reference to her reputation as the

The Politics of Prosopopoeia: The Pandora Sonnets 65

poet.8 In itself this is surprising; as the daughter of Mildred Cooke and William Cecil and as wife of Oxford, all poets, it would be expected that Anne de Vere wrote some poetry, if not the Pandora poems. Yet the only reference to her writing poetry in this collection occurs in a brief epitaph that refers to her as Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, and claiming that ‘Par suis Calliope numeris haec verba ligari’: ‘Calliope is equal with her metre to tie up these words.’9 The only possible reference among these epitaphs to the Soowthern text is in an epitaph by Joannes Shaxton that addresses Anne de Vere as Pandora. However, it makes no reference to her textual activity, but instead identifies a male author ‘of the gift’ joining in her praise, which may be a reference to Soowthern and a play on the title of his text: At comites in laude tua, Pandora, labascunt: Qui doni est author, laudis et ille comes.10 The epithet Pandora was read in the late sixteenth century to mean ‘allgifted’, the ‘perfect fusion of all things’. Indeed, it was used by Tartullian as a simile for Christ, rather than with its earlier connotations of the ‘beau mal’.11 Its association with monarchs as a common term of praise may mean that Shaxton used the term without reference to the Soowthern text. In either reading, the manuscript collection indicates that Anne de Vere was little known as a poet. Similarly, I have been able to locate no contemporary reference to Elizabeth’s authorship of the sonnet/epitaph to the Princess of E´pinoy. Leicester Bradner, unaware of the Steevens’ reprint and its subsequent inclusion in early nineteenth-century anthologies, claims that the sonnet attributed to Elizabeth I was not reprinted until its inclusion in Flu ¨ gel’s Anglia, 1892.12 The lack of contemporary reference to the status of either woman as the author of the sonnets attributed to them in Pandora suggests that the text was not read by its contemporary audience as an anthology of three authors, but as a generically mixed text in which the de Vere and Elizabeth sonnets were read, as May suggests, as examples of prosopopoeia written by Soowthern.13

The Pandora sonnets: Translations from Desportes The case for the sonnets as prosopopoeia is considerably strengthened by the fact that the sonnets attributed to Anne de Vere and the poem attributed to Elizabeth all contain passages of translation from Philippe Desportes’ Cartels et Masquarades, E´pitaphes.14 The translations are not straightforward, nor of discrete poems. A single sonnet may contain

66 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

translations from several poems, and these sections of translation are often interspersed with pieces of original text. Lines 5–14 of the first sonnet of the collection attributed to the Countess of Oxford are taken from the corresponding section of Desportes’ second epitaph to Franc¸ois Louis de Maugiron, a favourite of Henri III: Whose brest Venus, with a face dolefull and milde, Dooth washe with golden teares, inueying the skies: And when the water of the Goddesses eyes, Makes almost aliue, the Marble, of my Childe: One byds her leaue styll, her dollor so extreme Telling her it is not, her young sonne Papheme, To which she makes aunswer with a voice inflamed, (Feeling therewith her venime, to be more bitter) As I was of Cupid, euen so of it mother: ‘‘And a womans last chylde, is the most beloued. Lavant de pleurs son corps, d’ou` sortoit un estang De couleur tyrienne, a` sa tresse est cruelle, Et par maint chaud soupir de puissance immortelle S’efforce a` r’animer ce marbre froid et blanc. Ce n’est pas Cupidon, c’est Maugiron, Deesse, Luy dit quelqu’un tout bas, pour l’oster de tristesse; Mais elle jette alors des cris plus enflammez, Et sent de sa douleur la poison plus amere. Car, ainsi que d’Amour, de l’autre elle estoit mere, Et les derniers enfans sont tousjours mieux aimez (82) In the second sonnet attributed to Anne de Vere, I have been able to identify a close translation in the opening quatrain only, taken from the second quatrain of the eighth sonnet in Desportes’ sequence ‘Regrets Fune`bres sur la Mort de Diane’:15 In dolefull wayes I spend the wealth of my time: Feeding on my heart, that euer comes agen. Since the ordinaunce, of the Destin’s, hath ben, To end of the Saissons, of my yeeres the prime. En si piteux estat je despense mon temps, Me paissant de mon cœur, qui sans fin renouvelle, Depuis que des hauts cieux l’ordonnance cruelle Des saisons de ma vie arracha le printemps. (104)

The Politics of Prosopopoeia: The Pandora Sonnets 67

In the third of the sonnets attributed to Anne de Vere, l. 4 – ‘And my life dooth keepe mee heere against my will’ – is also taken from Desportes’ eighth epitaph in ‘Regrets Fune`bres sur la Mort de Diane’: Ah! despiteuse mort! ah rigoureuse vie! L’une a presque en naissant mon attente ravie, L’autre icy me retient contre ma volonte´. (104) The borrowings from Desportes are fewer in the third sonnet of the collection, taken from random lines of different epitaphs, and located mainly in the second quatrain: But if our life be caus’de with moisture and heate, I care neither for the death, the life, nor skyes: For I’ll sigh him warmth, and weat him with my eies: (And thus I shall be thought a second Prome¨t) Line 5 of the English text is a translation of line 9 of Desportes’ fourth epitaph from the sequence to Diane: ‘Si le chaud at l’humeur sont causes de la vie’ (100). Line 7 of the English text is a less direct translation, but uses as its model the image of Venus’ reanimating breath in Desportes’ second epitaph to Maugiron: ‘Et par maint chaud soupir de puissance immortelle / S’efforce a` r’animer ce marbre froid et blanc’ (82). The image of Promet at line 8 in the English text is also used in Desportes’ ‘E´le´gie VI’, line 43: ‘Veu que l’enfant Amour fait nouveau Promethe´e.’16 The fourth sonnet resumes the text’s close and extended translation from Desportes, taking as its source Desportes’ second epitaph to Jacques de Le´vy, sieur de Que´lus, another of the favourites of Henri III. In the opening quatrain of the Pandora sonnet, structure, phrasing and the example of Phoebus’ grief for Hyacinthus all derive from lines 5–7 of the epitaph to Le´vy. Lines 5 and 8 of the English text are taken from the same epitaph: line 5 is a loose and poor translation of line 9 in the French, and line 8 a close translation of line 12 in the French: IDall, for Adon, neu’r shed so many teares: Nor Thet’, for Pelid: nor Phœbus, for Hyacinthus: Nor for Atis, the mother of Prophetesses: As for the death of Bulbecke, the Gods haue cares. At the brute of it, the Aphroditan Queene, Caused more siluer to distyll fro her eyes:

68 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

Then when the droppes of her cheekes raysed Daisyes: And to die with him, mortall, she would haue beene. The Charits, for it breake their Peruqs, of golde: The Muses, and the Nymphes of Caues: I beholde: All the Gods vnder Olympus are constraint, On Laches, Clothon, and Atropos to plaine. And yet beautie, for it dooth make no complaint: For it liu’de with him, and died with him againe. La fin de Sarpedon, de Memnon et d’Achille Jamais au cœur des dieux n’esmeut tant de douleurs; Phebus sur Hyacinthe espandit moins de pleurs, Et l’ennuy de son fils luy sembla plus facile. Au bruit de son trespas, soudain, Venus la belle Eschauffa tout le ciel de soupirs infinis, Renouvellant l’obseque et le dueil d’Adonis, Et pour mourir sur luy se souhaita mortelle. (78–79) Random lines outside this section of Desportes’ long second epitaph to Le´vy also contribute to the English sonnet. Line nine in the English text – ‘The Charits, for it breake their Peruqs, of gold’ – bears a similarity to line 17 of the French epitaph – ‘Les Graces sans confort rompans leurs blonde tresses’. Similarly, line 11 of the English sonnet – ‘All the Gods vnder Olympus are constraint’ – is taken from line 21 of the epitaph to Le´vy – ‘Et, bref, les deı¨tez furent toutes contraintes.’ The final two lines of the English epitaph also correspond to the final lines of the French: La beaute´ seulement ne fit lors point de plaintes, Car elle print naissance et mourut quand et luy. (78–79) The two quatrains which conclude the collection are both translations of sections from Desportes’ sonnets, although they are introduced in the text as fragments of other sonnets composed by the Countess of Oxford: as ‘Others of the fowre last lynes, of other that she made also.’ All but the first line of the first quatrain is taken from lines 12 to 14 of the ninth epitaph in ‘Regrets Fune`bres sur la Mort de Diane’: 11 My Sonne is gone ? and with it, death end my sorrow, 12 But death makes mee aunswere ? Madame, cease these mones: 13 My force is but on bodies of blood and bones 14 And that of yours, is no more now, but a shadow.

The Politics of Prosopopoeia: The Pandora Sonnets 69

La Mort contre respond: ‘J’en ay fait mon devoir, Mais sur les corps mortels seulement j’ay pouvoir, Et ce qui fut ton corps n’est plus maintenant qu’ombre. (105) The second quatrain is taken from the first of a sequence of four femalevoiced sonnet/epitaphs in Cartels et Masquarades, E´pitaphes, a generic combination that might have provided the translator with the model for the generic mixing of the Pandora sonnets: 11 Amphioˆn’s wife was turned to a rocke. O 12 How well I had beene, had I had such aduenture, 13 For then I might againe haue beene the Sepulcure, 14 Of him that I bare in mee, so long ago. La femme d’Amphion, justement afflige´e, Par son dueil excessif en rocher fut change´e, Qui ses enfans meurtris semble encore pleurer. Que je serois heureuse ayant telle advanture! Car je pourrois servir d’aimable sepulture A celuy dont la mort ne me peut separer. (90) The substantial borrowing from Cartels et Masquarades, E´pitaphes, that is found in every poem of the collection attributed to the Countess of Oxford is also evident in the sonnet attributed to Elizabeth I, an epitaph mourning the death of the Princess of E´pinoy, Philippine-Christine de Lalaing. The sonnet is a compound of Desportes’ epitaph to Diane de Cosse´, and the second sonnet in the sequence ‘Regrets Fune`bres sur la Mort de Diane.’ The opening quatrain of the sonnet attributed to Elizabeth is a close translation of the same section from Desportes’ sonnet ‘De Diane de Cosse´, Comtesse de Mansfeld.’ The second quatrain of the English sonnet is not such a direct translation, but it resembles at certain points the second quatrain of the same epitaph from Desportes: When the warrier Phœbus, goth to make his round, With a painefull course, to too ther Hemispheˆre: A darke shadowe, a great horror, and a feare, In I knoe not what clowdes inueron the ground. And euen so for Pinoy, that fayre vertues Lady, (Although Iupiter haue in this Orizoˆn, Made a starre of her, by the Ariadnan crowne) Morns, dolour, and griefe, accompany our body.

70 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

Quand le soleil nous laisse, et que tout radieux, Il va luire a` son tour parmy l’autre hemisphere, Tout se couvre d’ombrage, et ce qui souloit plaire Prend un visage triste, et se fait ennuyeux. Ainsi, chaste Diane, en quittant ces bas lieux, Pour faire luire au ciel ta flamme ardante et claire, Quel nuage de pleurs, quelle horreur solitaire, Quelle ombre et quelle nuict laisses-tu sur nos yeux? (56) Elements of close translation resume in the final sestet of the text, which is heavily derivative of the final sestet of Desportes’ second sonnet in the sequence ‘Regrets Fune`bres sur la Mort de Diane’: O Atropos, thou hast doone a worke per-uerst. And as a byrde that hath lost both young, and nest: About the place where it was, makes many a tourne. Euen so dooth Cupid, that infaunt, God, of amore, Flie about the tombe, where she lyes all in dolore, Weeping for her eies, wherein he made soiourne. Comme quand l’arondelle a perdu sa niche´e, Elle crie, elle vole amerement touche´e, Ne peut laisser son nid, y fait maint et maint tour, Ainsi le pauvre Amour gemit, soupire et pleure Sans partir du tombeau, vole et revole autour, Ayant perdu les yeux ou` il fist sa demeure. (98) That all these sonnets contain sections of translation from Cartels et Masquarades, E´pitaphes, is not conclusive evidence in itself that the attribution made to the Countess of Oxford by Moody, Schleiner, Walker, Wynne-Davies and Fienberg is false, although it does problematize Moody’s perception of ‘a strong difference between the mood and character presented in the sonnet sequence and in the single sonnet attributed to Elizabeth’. As the translations of Petrarchan sonnets by Elizabeth Carey Berkeley probably formed part of her Italian tuition, these French translations might be evidence of the French scholarship or tuition of both Elizabeth and Anne de Vere.17 However, the publication of both women’s sonnets in Pandora is significant in questioning their attribution. Prior to the publication of these recent articles, Pandora has come to critical attention mainly because of George Puttenham’s identification of Soowthern’s use of the poetry of the Ple´iade as an unattributed source

The Politics of Prosopopoeia: The Pandora Sonnets 71

in The Arte of English Poesie. Puttenham’s comments are not completely negative. Listed under chapter xxii – ‘Some vices in speaches and writing are alwayes intollerable, some others now and then borne withall by licence of approued authors and custome’ – the entry for Soowthern opens with his description as a poet ‘of reasonable good facilitie in translatio . . . ’.18 Most of Puttenham’s criticism centres upon Soowthern’s use of French terms in the place of English words, seen as a corruption of the vernacular: a use which has ‘no maner of conformitie with our language either by custome or deriuation which may make them tollerable’. He takes exception to Soowthern’s claim to be the first to imitate Pindar – not because of the claim itself but because of its phrasing as an exact translation of Ronsard’s identical claim in French. Puttenham’s criticisms of Soowthern finish, however, in converting his use of French words and ‘other mens deuises’ into a general principle against the deception of unattributed imitation: for in deede as I would wish euery inve[n]tour which is the very Poet to receaue the prayses of his inuention, so would I not have a tra[n]slatour be ashamed to be acknowen of his translation. However, it is questionable whether Soowthern can be seen as exceptional in his guilt of either the ‘vice’ of the unjust reception of praise or the failure to acknowledge sources in Pandora. Plagiarism in late sixteenth-century English poetry was a common practice, and Ronsard a common source: four of Thomas Watson’s 18-line sonnets in Hekatompathia derive from Ronsard’s Meslanges; two sonnets of Arthur Gorges published in The Phoenix Nest were taken from the Amours.19 Janet Scott comments that Soowthern’s Pandora demonstrates the methods followed by most Elizabethan sonneteers in its appropriation of French texts. Puttenham’s commentary, however, uses Soowthern as an example of fault, distinguishing him as particularly reprehensible even though Soowthern’s practice was common to the period.20 Nor was Soowthern unusually covert in his use of the poetry of the Ple´iade as a source. In the second sonnet to Diana, his pen is represented as singing ‘Petrark, Tien, Ovide, Ronsar’. And in the verses in French that conclude the text, Soowthern’s debt to Ronsard is acknowledged in brackets within the opening line itself: ‘Dieue que ie hay (ronsard) qui rien ne se propoze’. Soowthern does not signal his use of Desportes as a source; however, the 13th sonnet to Diana in Pandora is a close translation of sonnet 34 in Desportes’ Les Amours de Diane.21 Although Soowthern’s translation in sonnet 13 is of a single sonnet, his general

72 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

method of translation in Pandora corresponds to that used in the sonnets attributed to the women: a single poem may contain sections of translation from more than one poem, interspersed with linking sections of original work. The stylistic similarities that Steven May identifies between the sonnets attributed to the women and Soowthern’s text are compounded by the status of all the separately attributed sonnets as full or partial translations from Desportes. Although they are at times fragmented translations, they are more than mere ‘similarities,’ as Marion Wynne-Davis claims.22 And of course all these translations of sonnets are located in the context of a larger male-authored text that makes overt gestures towards its use of the poetry of the Ple´iade as a source, and that specifically contains other translations from Desportes. This element of translation extends May’s caveat against the attribution to the Countess of Oxford and Elizabeth I on stylistic grounds. And when these considerations are coupled with the lack of contemporary manuscript reference to either of the women as sonneteer, the possibility of their authorship of the sonnets seems increasingly remote.

Ventriloquizing Elizabeth I If, as seems likely, Soowthern wrote these sonnets, then they indicate some of ways in which the female signature and ideas of ‘women’s writing’ in secular lyric forms might have been used in England in the 1580s. The sonnets are not only examples of the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia, but also follow the 1560 Meditations and the casket sonnets by including elements of complaint. The positioning of these sonnets within the sixteenth-century tradition of complaint is a complex one because they precede the genre’s height around 1600. Elizabethan complaints often construct an elaborate frame around the lamenting voice of the female speaker; the male narrator observes, overhears and narrates his version of the female lament. Here the framing male voice of Soowthern is not explicit within the poems; the female voices are positioned within the frame of the male-authored text as a whole, and this context complicates the status of the woman speaker. The contrast between the authorizing male observer or listener and the objectified female plainant is obscured, and the female voices stand autonomously in the text as lamenting subjects. This negotiated subjectivity again facilitates the women’s generically unusual entry as subjects of sonnets, and the location of the female speakers in traditionally male textual positions neatly contributes to the text’s ambiguity of authorship,

The Politics of Prosopopoeia: The Pandora Sonnets 73

further complicated by the status of both texts as feminized translations of the male voice of Desportes. Soowthern’s free textual assigning of gender over the Desportes text – a male voice in his own sonnet 13, the female voices of the women’s sonnets – is an early example of the fluidity of gender that characterizes the complaint. As Kerrigan argues, this is especially apparent around 1600, when England’s Helicon changed the significance of sexual difference in the complaint; this elision of gender draws upon a longer tradition that goes past the female-voiced Christ of Middle English lyric to biblical laments.23 As in the case of the casket sonnets, placing the Pandora sonnets within the wide generic frame of the complaint is helpful in examining the generic innovations that they appear to enact upon the sonnet. The emphasis in the sonnets attributed to de Vere is upon the speaker’s defence of her virtue, and the central 3rd sonnet finishes by immortalizing its female speaker on the basis of her virtue. This is a trope that places the collection within a tradition leading back to Catherine Parr’s puritan lamentations, themselves part of the Calvinist penitent tradition for which the plainant David is a model.24 The complaint crosses public and private boundaries, associating the private lamenting voice with the authority of the exemplary Protestant monarch. If the sonnets attributed to de Vere may be placed within this tradition, their connection with the sonnet attributed to Elizabeth becomes clearer. Situating the sovereign in the same subject position as the Protestant humanist speaker Anne de Vere, virtuous in lament, Soowthern makes a public connection between the sonnets attributed to de Vere and Elizabeth, and his assumption of Elizabeth’s voice, presenting her position of sympathy for the Protestant Princess de Lalaing of the Netherlands in an instructive project, carries with it the biblical and historical authority of David. It is a different version of the use of David’s voice to direct the queen employed in the 1560 Meditation. Here, in Elizabeth I’s association with the more immediate historical example of Christine de Lalaing, the sonnet attributed to Elizabeth also combines its mixing of lamentation and complaint with an interest in historia, an early humanist rhetorical figure in which instruction is made through the examples of historical figures.25 Pandora forms an elaborate frame around the sonnet through a series of disguising mechanisms: through its claim to deal only with the ‘amourous’, not the ‘death of any valliant soldier’, in the ‘Sonnet to the Reader’; and through the secondary frame of the de Vere sonnets, which positions the speaker in a simultaneous private and public mode. The use of the complaint genre, with its attendant ambiguities of authorship, allows Soowthern to produce an admonitory political and

74 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

Protestant text. At the same time, he can appeal to a wider audience of erotic poetry while dissociating himself from the authorship of the project. It is this instructive aspect to the collection that may have prompted Puttenham’s hostility to the text. Puttenham’s criticism seems excessive not only because Soowthern highlights his debts to the Ple´iade in the text, but also because Soowthern’s readers would probably have been sufficiently familiar with Ronsard’s poetry to recognize the text’s sources. Ronsard’s public role in defence of the dynasty of the French monarchy, used by the French government as propaganda for a domestic and overseas readership, was known to Elizabeth and Leicester; Ronsard was identified in England up to 1565 as a supporter of Mary Queen of Scots, and a representative of her support abroad.26 However, in 1565, Ronsard began to seek the favour of the Elizabethan court. In August, the French ambassador sent a copy of E´le´gies, mascarades et bergerie, to William Cecil with a preface to Elizabeth and with the intention that it be presented to her. It also contained elegies to Leicester and William Cecil. As Anne Prescott argues, by the 1570s Ronsard functioned in the literary circle of Sidney, Dyer, Greville and Harvey as a link between the Continent and England mainly through the interest of Daniel Rogers. By the 1580s, therefore, Ronsard’s religious and public poetry was part of the literary currency, although Soowthern’s reference to Ronsard’s erotic verse represents a departure from this representation.27 However, Ronsard’s claim to Pindaric imitation, translated by Soowthern and identified as plagiarism by Puttenham, had been in circulation since 1550 and may well have been recognizable to English readers. The common use of plagiarism, Soowthern’s textual gestures towards Ronsard, and the circulation in the English court of Ronsard’s poetry question Puttenham’s claims of Soowthern’s literary ‘vice’, and raise the question of a different motivation for his selection of the Arte of English Poesie. Considering Puttenham’s encouragement of the dissemblance of the courtier in his text, his strictures against Soowthern’s perceived plagiarisms seem to undercut his prescriptions for the behaviour of the courtier-poet. The Arte of English Poesie centres on the textual production of Elizabeth I. She is represented as the exemplary poet at its outset: ‘your selfe being alreadie, of any that I know in our time, the most excellent Poet’, ‘a most cunning counterfaitor’.28 Her poetry is used to represent the rhetorical figure of the Gorgious: a figure that provides the final gloss or polish upon speech, as represented through the double metaphors of providing rough stone with a mirror finish or the naked body with ‘rich and gorgious’ apparel. This double image represents the limits within which Puttenham moves. The practice of polished, courtierly poetic discourse

The Politics of Prosopopoeia: The Pandora Sonnets 75

challenges the queen’s authority as exemplary practitioner of the Gorgious; as Rosemary Kegl suggests, such discourse takes possession of the queen’s naked body and threatens it with the poet’s authority to clothe or strip, ornament or expose.29 However, this potential challenge to the queen’s authority is clearly limited by Puttenham. He goes on to use the metaphor of polished stone to represent the queen’s ability to make polished discourse mirror her own face and reproduce her authority, ‘the bewtie of Queenes’.30 Puttenham as poet can rhetorically usurp the queen’s authority only to the extent that he also reproduces it. This is an argument that may be linked to his reproduction of her poetic texts: Puttenham is the first to publish Elizabeth I’s verse. Although this allows him textual control of her voice, and metaphorically her body, he reclothes her in his location of her voice as exemplary, reinforcing her authority and the absolutist state. Puttenham’s control of Elizabeth’s voice is itself exemplary, and it is this example that Soowthern’s text radically exceeds. The publication of a poem under Elizabeth’s signature in 1584 is a transgressive act in political terms, amounting to a usurpation of one of the mechanisms employed by the queen to construct, control and reinforce her authority. The sonnet attributed to Elizabeth in Pandora is an epitaph in praise and mourning to the Protestant Princess of E´pinoy, Philippine-Christine de Lalaing. In November 1581, in the absence of her husband Pierre de Melun, head of William of Orange’s forces in the Netherlands, but with the aid of Melun’s lieutenant, de Lalaing defended for the States-General the town of Tournai against the armies of Alexandre Farne`se. Despite her lack of success, in deference to her courage, she was allowed to leave the city with her household by Farne`se.31 During the conflict, she also lost an infant. The sonnet attributed to Elizabeth makes reference to both these events, and thus obliquely to the battle, in figuring Cupid’s grieving flight over her tomb as that of ‘a byrde that hath lost both young, and nest’. De Lalaing’s life provides a model for the role of the active Protestant Princess in the Netherlands conflict, in contrast to Elizabeth I’s hesitancy. Ironically, at the same time as Parma took Tournai, the last Walloon province remaining to the States-General, Anjou – as Orange’s appointed sovereign of the Netherlands – left for England to resume his courtship of Elizabeth.32 The link that Soowthern makes between Elizabeth and the Princess of E´pinoy works as an admonitory example of the correct behaviour of a Protestant Princess towards the war with Spain in the Netherlands, and implicitly of the course of active support that Elizabeth should follow. This admonition works not to reinforce the state but to direct it; the reproduction of Elizabeth’s voice

76 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

reflects not her authority in its mirror but that of Soowthern. The opposition between Soowthern and Puttenham here reflects the opposition between mid-Tudor humanism, in which textual production could act as a moral instruction on what should be done, and the emergent politics of the court and its courtiers, which were characterized by the text’s expedient praise of what has been done. Puttenham’s hostility to Soowthern’s text and its lack of courtierly decorum also raises the question of the placement of Soowthern politically. Little biographical information is available. Based upon the internal evidence he locates in Pandora, George Steevens makes the conjecture that Soowthern was a French and a (presumably Protestant) refugee; however, this identification of religious orientation is weakened by an examination of Steevens’ evidence. He bases his conjecture on Soowthern’s ability to write the text’s concluding verses in French, his use of French terms and spelling, his reference to ‘our old Ronsard of France’, the use of the epithet ‘rude’ to describe the English and finally the use of ‘non careo patria me caret illa magis’.33 Steevens decontextualizes these phrases to support his argument. The ‘rude English’ occurs in a sequence of similar epithets relating to other countries as well as England. It works to associate the author not with public and patriotic themes but with a separate and private domain of love: Thou find’st not heere, neither the furious alarmes, Of the pride of Spaine, or subtilnes of France: Nor of the rude English, or mutine Almanes: Nor neither of Naples, noble men of armes. No, an Infant, and that yet surmounteth Knights: Hath both vanquished me, and also my Muse. The same dissociation from poetry’s public function is expressed in the Latin quotation that concludes the odes, indicating a shift in emphasis rather than evidence of the poet’s origins. The reference to ‘our old Ronsard of France’ in the final ode is balanced by repeated references to ‘our England’ in earlier poems, and this phrase is used at the end of the sequence to Diana in an epode that seeks to establish Soowthern as an exemplary English poet – a ‘well learned voice’ – in contrast to the ‘doting rimers’ that dishonour both themselves and ‘our England’. This indicates a contradiction of the opening statements dissociating the text from a patriotic purpose: the change in literary emphasis is in fact recruited to support a project that aligns Soowthern with the defence of English verse. However, although the evidence for Soowthern’s

The Politics of Prosopopoeia: The Pandora Sonnets 77

French nationality is minimal, his religious allegiances may be reconstructed through his selection of Anne de Vere as the figure through which his sonnet/epitaphs are transmitted and the connection that is made between Elizabeth I and the Protestant Princess of E´pinoy. During her lifetime, five texts were dedicated to Anne de Vere, three of which identify her as a supporter of Protestantism. A translation from Greek of St John Chrysostome’s exposition upon St Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians, published in 1581, is dedicated to de Vere as ‘a mirror to beholde true godlinesse and vertue’.34 Her identity as a virtuous figure is stressed in the other texts which associate her more closely with the Protestant cause. Again, in 1581, Abraham Fleming’s translation of Nicholas Hemming’s epistle to the Ephesians is dedicated to Anne because of her ‘zealous love to religion’; the Protestant cast of the translation is emphasized by a later reference in the dedication to ‘Impudent Papists’.35 Another translation from French dedicated to her is A Christian Discourse upon Certeine Poynts of Religion by John Brooke; his other works include Of Two Wonderful Popish Monsters.36 The dedication of Sir Geoffrey Fenton’s Golden Epistles identifies de Vere as a figure of learning as well as virtue – ‘noted a diligent follower of those Artes and studies which best serve to the declaracion and glory of true vertue and pietie’ – and in this context Fenton stresses her connection not with her husband Oxford but with her ‘honourable house and parents’.37 Soowthern’s use of de Vere’s Protestant identity is also reflected in the sonnet attributed to Elizabeth I. The sonnet appropriates Elizabeth’s identity in order to project her allegiance with the Protestant faction in the Netherlands. The effect of the piece is admonitory, or instructive, expressing alliance in its grief and praise for E´pinoy: And euen so for Pinoy, that fayre vertues Lady, (Although Iupiter haue in this Orizoˆn, Made a starre of her, by the Ariadnan crowne) Morns, dolour, and griefe, accompany our body. The sonnet is published in a period following the deaths of the Duke of Anjou and William of Orange in 1584 when Elizabeth’s policy concerning the Netherlands was moving towards the more active military involvement that led in August 1585 to the Treaty of Nonsuch. England was to provide a Governor General to direct the war and coordinate government in return for the provision of both a large army to relieve Antwerp and 600,000 florins a year.38 In December 1585, Leicester was sent to Flushing as the Governor General. The timing of Soowthern’s admonitory sonnet

78 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

aligning Elizabeth with the Dutch Protestant defence of its cities against Spain raises the possibility of Soowthern’s support for Leicester’s expedition to the Netherlands and his support of the international Protestant cause. The sonnets attributed to de Vere and Elizabeth locate Pandora not as the apolitical text of Soowthern’s initial vaunts – claims that he sings ‘no death of any valliant soldier’, but rather confines himself to the amorous – but as a text seeking to instruct the monarch or to fictively construct the monarch’s position for others in alignment with Protestant activism in the Netherlands. Leicester was the primary force in mobilizing influence and clientele in support of the Netherlands during this period. However the possibility of Soowthern’s link with Leicester is made more remote by his connection of Pandora with Anne de Vere, given her close associations with her father William Cecil’s household and Burghley’s political distance from Leicester.39 Whatever the strength of Soowthern’s political alliance, however, his selection of writing attributed to Anne de Vere and the praise of the Princess of E´pinoy located in Pandora strongly suggest that his political orientation was Protestant. This association opens the possibility of a secondary ground for Puttenham’s resistance to Soowthern’s text. Puttenham’s expedient praise of Elizabeth’s policy is exemplified in a section of text concerned with her action in the Netherlands that was removed from the 1589 published text of the Arte of English Poesie. The original text contained a passage advising Elizabeth not to take action against the Dutch. It identifies the Flemish as ‘a people very vnthankfull and mutable, and rebellious against their Princes’, and on these grounds advises against Elizabeth’s involvement in their cause: I pray you what likelihood is there they should be more assured to the Queene of England, than they haue bene to all these princes and gouernors, longer than their distresse continueth, and is to be relieued by her goodnes and puissance.40 The passage was written between 1583 and 1585, and it advocates an action in direct opposition to that implied by the Soowthern text. It was cancelled in the press and replaced by a passage more in keeping with Elizabeth’s taking of action in the Netherlands. The corrected text establishes a historical and political principle of the prince’s defence of ‘their good neighbors Princes and Potentats, from all oppression of tyrants & vsurpers’. According to such a principle: why may not the Queene our soueraine Lady with like honor and godly zele yeld protection to the people of the Low countries, her

The Politics of Prosopopoeia: The Pandora Sonnets 79

neerest neighbours to rescue them a free people from the Spanish seruitude.41 The Soowthern text is indecorous in its prescriptiveness, in its failure to disguise its overreaching and in its advocacy of a Protestant position in opposition to Puttenham’s political stance (during 1584 at least). The strength of Puttenham’s original political alliances in opposition to Puritanism are manifest in the earlier text of Partheniades, where two sections of politically directed poetry are introduced by a passage describing them as ‘Conteinynge an invective agaynste the Puritants’.42 The text was presented to Elizabeth I as a New Year’s gift in 1579, and is a more overtly admonitory piece than Soowthern’s; it indicates the extent of their political opposition and the extent to which Puttenham’s policy of courtierly decorum had been altered by the time of his textual revisions between 1583 and 1585. Finally, Soowthern’s text also challenges Puttenham’s status as sanctioned publisher of the voice of the monarch in its attributing of the E´pinoy sonnet to Elizabeth I.

The politics of prosopopoeia Although a political context for Soowthern’s ventriloquizing of Elizabeth’s voice in this text may be reconstructed through the subject matter of the sonnet, the choice of Anne de Vere and the circumstances of the death of her son as a subject for prosopopoeia are less easily retrieved. The complaint as a genre attracts biographical speculation, and it is clear from the history of criticism connected with the casket sonnets that such speculation is not always illuminating, and may be misleading.43 However, Pandora as a whole was dedicated to Anne de Vere’s husband Oxford, and the sonnets attributed to her deal with the death of her infant son. These biographical connections raise the question of the purchase that Soowthern might gain through the publication of a prosopopoeia so intimately concerned with recent events in the de Vere family history, especially in the light of the turbulence of that history. The event with which the sonnets are concerned, the birth of her second child Lord Bulbecke, came as the result of Anne de Vere’s reunion with her husband, the Earl of Oxford, after an estrangement of over five years. The reasons for this period of separation, initiated by the Earl of Oxford, ostensibly centre upon the paternity of Anne de Vere’s first child, Elizabeth, born on 2 July 1575. Elizabeth was born while Oxford was travelling on the Continent, a journey begun on 7 January 1575. His response to news of his wife’s

80 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

pregnancy in a letter of 17 March to William Cecil is favourable and uncomplicated: ‘I thank God therefore, with your Lordship, that it hath pleased Him to make me a father, where your Lordship is a grandfather.’44 However, in England rumours had begun to circulate, casting doubt over the child’s paternity. Dr Richard Masters, physician to the queen and purportedly to Anne de Vere, recounts to Lord Burghley an audience with Elizabeth on 7 March 1575, in which he tells the queen of his observation of Anne de Vere’s grief at news of her pregnancy and of Oxford’s public statement to him that ‘if she were with child it was not his’.45 The account of Oxford’s response to Masters is dubious given the correspondence between Burghley and Oxford of 17 March 1575, in which Oxford demonstrates no previous knowledge of his wife’s pregnancy, and given his documented pleasure and validation of the birth of his daughter. However, as B.M. Ward argues the rumours were sufficient for Lord Burghley to make a list of dates of the periods of Lord and Lady Oxford’s cohabitation and separation and to make note of another rumour communicated to him. This concerned Oxford’s confession to Lord Howard that ‘he lay not with his wife but at Hampton Court, and that then the child could not be his, because the child was born in July which was not the space of twelve months’.46 Upon Oxford’s return to England his sentiments towards Anne de Vere and Lord Burghley had changed. Upon landing in England on 20 April he was met by his wife and father-in-law. But he refused to speak to them and went directly to an audience with the queen. On 27 April, Oxford wrote to Burghley to inform him that ‘until he can better satisfy or advertise himself concerning certain ‘‘mislikes’’ he is not determined to accompany her’, and arranged for his wife to live in her father’s house.47 The estrangement of the Cecils and Oxford rested upon more than the paternity of their first child, Elizabeth de Vere; it also concerned Oxford’s interpretation of Burghley’s behaviour in his absence in providing him with sufficient money and maintaining his reputation and patronage at court. However, the paternity of the child was at issue in the initial separation of the couple, and so implicitly was the virtue of the Countess, evident in Cecil’s defence of his daughter in a letter to the queen: I [do thynk] did never see in her behauior in word or dede, nor ever cold pecave by any other meane, but yt she hath [in his absence] alwaiss vsed hir self, honestly, chastly, and lovingly towards hym, and now [at] vppon expectation of his coming, so filled wt Joye thereof, so desyrouss to se yt tyme of the arryvall approch, as in my Jugdgmet, no yong lover rooled or other in love of any pson cold

The Politics of Prosopopoeia: The Pandora Sonnets 81

more excsaayuly shew yt same wt all comely ntens, no whan. after his arryvall some douts, wer cast of his acceptance of hir [in respect of former passadgs] hir Inocency, semed to mak hir so bold as she never cast any care of thyngs past, but wholly [reposed hyr self upp] reposed hir self wt assurance to be well used by him. and wt that confidence, and importunite made to me, she went to hym, and ther missed of hir expectation . . .48 The estrangement of Oxford from Anne de Vere extended until Christmas, 1582. The events leading to their reunion also dealt with Anne de Vere’s status in the genealogical hierarchy accorded to her as Oxford’s wife. During their separation, Oxford became involved with Anne Vavasour, who came to court as a Gentlewoman of the Bedchamber in 1580. A letter from Walsingham to the Earl of Huntingdon, of 23 March 1581, records the scandal of Vavasour’s delivery of a son in the maidens’ chambers, christened Edward Vere.49 According to Walsingham’s letter, Vavasour was admitted to the Tower on the night of the birth; Oxford left the court to ‘pass the seas’, but as the ports were closed to him he was unsuccessful and eventually committed to the Tower. Although released on the 8th of June, he was confined to house until the following July, and banned from court for two years.50 This period of alienation from the court coincided with Oxford’s reconciliation with Anne de Vere. On 7 December 1581, her letter to him centres on the beginnings of reconciliation: And now of late havyng had some hope in my own conciet, yt your L wold have renewed some part of your favor that you begd to shew me this sommur, whan you [may] made me assurad of your good mening thovgh you seemed fearefull how to shew it by oppen ad’nds, Now after long silence of hearyng any thyng from you, at yt h’ndgdh, I am informed but how truly I know not, and yet how uncomfortably, I do fele it, yt your L is entered into some mislykyng of me wtout any cause in dede or thought.51 His reply is lost, but her answering letter of 12 December 1581 indicates the restoration of her status as his wife and the expectation of their reunion: My very good Lord, I most hartily thank you for your love, and am most sorry, to perceave how you ar [as it semeth to me constrayned to] vnqeted wt the vncertenty of yt [somb] world wherof I myself am

82 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

not witout some tast. but semg you will me to assure my self of any thyng yt I may as your wiff challeng of you, I will yt more paciently abyde yt adversety which otherwise I feale. and if God wold so permitt it and yt it might be good for you I wold beare yt gretar part of your adverss fortune and mak it [a] my comfort [to den the by my suffryng] to [hav] beare [a] part wt you. . . . Good my lord assure your self, it is you whom only I love and feare, and am so desyrouss above all yt world to please you [and] wishyng yt I might heare ofttener from you vntill [God may so] better fortune will haue vs mete togithr.52 On 9 May 1583, the burial of Anne de Vere’s son is recorded in the parish register of the church at Castle Hedingham as ‘The Earl of Oxenford’s first son’. Against this context, in which the paternity of her first child had been the subject of rumour and dispute and had been implicitly challenged by the birth of an illegitimate male heir, and at the point when a reconciliation with her husband removed her from a false widowhood lived at her father’s house, the collection of elegaic sonnets upon the death of her first son to Oxford was published under Anne de Vere’s name in a text dedicated to Oxford. The sonnets themselves figure the dead child as an object of possession and exchange, a concern that leads back to the speaker’s elegaic concern with self-construction in terms of her maternity and thus the legitimacy of her place in a familial hierarchy. This characterization of the child in material terms is additional to the Desportes source. If, as Steven May suggests, Soowthern’s attribution of the sonnets to Anne de Vere is a means of gaining patronage through the device of prosopopoeia, the emphasis of the sonnets upon the speaking mother’s virtue and status would be a promising subject in attracting Anne de Vere’s favour.53 Her patronage would mean not only the access to opportunities for literary patronage within Oxford’s circle, but also the possibility of attracting the attention of Elizabeth to the admonitory sonnet written in her name through Anne de Vere’s connection with Cecil and her position as a consistent recipient of the queen’s favour. The opening sonnet of the collection attributed to Anne de Vere centres in the octave upon the possession of the son’s body, a possession figured in specifically economic terms: Had with moorning the Gods, left their willes vndon, They had not so soone herited such a soule:

The Politics of Prosopopoeia: The Pandora Sonnets 83

Or if the mouth, tyme dyd not glotton vp all. Nor I, nor the world, were depriu’d of my Sonne, Whose brest Venus, with a face dolefull and milde, Dooth washe with golden teares, inueying the skies: And when the water of the Goddesses eyes, Makes almost aliue, the Marble, of my Childe: Bulbecke’s death is represented in the second line as ‘herited’ by the gods; here the familial context of succession and, implicitly, of economic gain is transferred to a divine context. The child’s position in death is figured in terms of the recipient of Venus’ ‘golden teares’ in a second economic image, taken from Desportes’ second epitaph to Franc¸ois Louis de Maugiron, one of the children of Henri III, killed in a duel in April, 1578.54 The image of Venus’ tears washing the child’s body – ‘lavant de pleurs son corps’ – marks the English text’s emphasis upon the figuring of the child as a privileged object of financial value: the tears of Venus which in Desportes’ sonnet form a pool ‘de couleur tyrienne’, a deep purple associated in classical mythology with royalty, are transformed in the English text to gold, and this gold is specifically associated with the body of the infant. The sonnet’s second quatrain thus establishes a mythological framework that represents the child in economic terms as inherited and inheritor. This is idiosyncratic: as Pamela Hammons argues in relation to seventeenth-century English child loss poetry, the construction of the dead child as lost property becomes a commonplace, but one linked to Christian ideas of creation as God’s possession.55 The construction here of the lost child is less in terms of a temporary gift from God, and more in terms of his role within economic and secular systems of exchange. In the second section of the sonnet, the child’s privileged body in a system of economic circulation becomes a site of possessive dispute between the goddess and the sonnet’s speaker, the grieving mother: One byds her leaue styll, her dollor so extreme, Telling her it is not, her young sonne Papheme, To which she makes aunswer with a voice inflamed, (Feeling therewith her venime, to be more bitter) As I was of Cupid, euen so of its mother: ‘‘And a womans last chylde, is the most beloued. The urging of an appropriate decorum to Venus places at the centre of the sonnet a dramatization of the possession of the child; his

84 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

status as heir is transferred from systems of solely patriarchal privilege to those of maternal possession and maternal status in those systems. The final sestet breaks down the struggle for possession of the son’s body into a more general statement of grief and solidarity in the face of maternal loss, a shared emotional experience to which the possession of the body of the specific child becomes extraneous: ‘ ‘‘And a womans last chylde, is the most beloued.’ Importantly, this line marks a deviation from the French text’s generalized statement – ‘Et les derniers enfans sont toujours mieux aimez’ – to the specific figuring of the last child in systems of exclusively feminine exchange – ‘And a womans last chylde’ (my italics). This shift asserts a differentiated hierarchy without connection to property or genealogical status dependent upon gender, one that is predicated upon change through regeneration and whose privileges are transferable from child to child. As Moody comments, Bulbecke has become Venus’ most recent child, but the goddess’ assertion of the rights of grief over the child’s body is one that allows equal right to mourning to both women – the mother whose last child has died, and the goddess who has ‘herited such a soule’ after its death.56 The expression of private grief is resisted and modified in the sonnet, subordinate to an examination of women’s place, and resistance to that place, in systems of patriarchal privilege in familial genealogy. The second sonnet focuses upon the woman speaker, replacing the dramatized feminine economy of exchange asserted in the first sonnet with an amplification of the mother’s grief and an internalised meditation upon her loss as a means of her virtuous self-construction. In dolefull wayes I spend the wealth of my time: Feeding on my heart, that euer comes agen. Since the ordinaunce, of the Destin’s, hath ben, To end of the Saissons, of my yeeres the prime. With my Son[n]e, my Gold, my Nightingale, and Rose, Is gone: for t’was in him and no other where: And well though mine eies run downe like fountaines here, The stone wil not speak yet, that it does inclose. And Destins, and Gods, you might rather haue tanne, My twentie yeeres: then the two daies of my sonne. And of this world what shall I hope, since I knoe, That in his respect, it can yeeld me but mosse: Or what should I consume any more in woe, When Destins, Gods, and worlds, are in my losse.

The Politics of Prosopopoeia: The Pandora Sonnets 85

The image of the all-consuming, greedy ‘mouth, tyme’ is appropriated by the speaker in the second sonnet as ‘my time’, a source of ‘wealth’ only in an alternative economy predicated upon loss. The addition of the term ‘wealth’ with reference to time is the only divergence of the English text from the French. This addition repeats the emphasis upon the speaker’s position in material and financial economies added to the first sonnet but registers here that the speaker’s access to such wealth now exists in a private economy distinct from the public world in which the son’s body is privileged. The speaker places herself in a parallel position to that of Venus in sonnet 1 in lines 7 and 8, weeping over the stone of the child’s grave, a repetition that contributes to the sense of teleological absence in the sonnet. The dialogue of the first sonnet is narrowed to the single voice of the speaker, unanswered by the silent voice of the grave: ‘The stone wil not speak yet, that doth it inclose.’ The emphasis on time culminates in the central couplet when the speaker challenges the external ordinances of ‘Destins, and Gods’ to have taken ‘My twentie yeeres: then the two daies of my sonne.’ The internalized time set up by the speaker in a hermetic economy is rhetorically declared valueless, or valued only in terms of the son’s life. In dramatizing and enlarging the loss of the child to contain ‘Destins, Gods, and worlds’, the speaker’s own internal economy supplants all else: her hyperbolized construction of the loss contained in the body of her child subjects the mythological and the material to her own textual processes of elegaic construction. Her constructed loss contains and consumes all, leaving her voice as mourning subject at the centre of the text, as the loss of her son becomes a means of amplifying her virtuous selfconstruction. This project is made explicit in the final two sonnets, in which the speaker’s desire for death becomes a means of asserting her place in a divine economy. In the third sonnet, her grief invests her first with divine powers of reanimation, then with a form of dazzling, virtuous autonomy: But if our life be caus’de with moisture and heate, I care neither for the death, the life, nor skyes: For I’ll sigh him warmth, and weat him with my eies: (And thus I shall be thought a second Prome¨t) And as for life, let it doo me all despite: For if it leaue me, I shall goe to my childe: And it in the heuens, there is all my delyght. And if I liue, my vertue is immortall.

86 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

‘‘So that the heuens, death and life, when they doo all ‘‘Their force: by sorrowfull vertue th’are beguild. The sonnet returns to the point of the grieving woman over the gravestone of the child. But where the tears of Venus can only render the child ‘almost aliue’, in this sonnet the effect on the child is regarded as less important than the creative process itself and its impact upon the speaker. In this sense, the third sonnet becomes a document of the attraction and construction of fame.57 The speaker constructs an inviolable position for herself: in death a reunion with the lost child, and in life an immortal virtue. She is involved in a process of self-construction in which a resistance to overwhelming and uncontrollable powers is charted, first by the containment and internalization of those powers ‘in my losse’ and then in the elevation of her own subjectivity to a divine level and beyond. In the fourth sonnet, a catalogue of mythological figures selected in the speaker’s grief is not merely illustrative, but placed in a dynamic of competition with the speaker. The effect is to establish her virtue above divine precedent and to recruit even her mortality as a competitive advantage: IDall, for Adon, neu’r shed so many teares: Nor Thet’, for Pelid: nor Phœbus, for Hyacinthus: Nor for Atis, the mother of Prophetesses: As for the death of Bulbecke, the Gods haue cares. At the brute of it, the Aphroditan Queene, Caused more siluer to distyll fro her eyes: Then when the droppes of her cheekes raysed Daisyes: And to die with him, mortall, she would haue beene. The collection ostensibly finishes as conventional elegy, with its emphasis upon the child’s death, but the divine consequences of that death point back to the speaker’s elevated self-construction. In this process, the death of the child becomes a shield against further adversity and the stage for the amplification of Anne de Vere’s status as virtuous mother – a position that up to this point has been the subject of rumour and question. Her son’s death is transformed in the sonnets from an event destabilizing her position within the Oxford genealogy to one where elegy to the child reinforces both her virtue and her status as mother. Soowthern’s publication of this flattering prosopopoeia in sonnet form, in a text dedicated to the Earl of Oxford and circulated in print, complicates the history of early modern women’s access to the genre of

The Politics of Prosopopoeia: The Pandora Sonnets 87

the sonnet sequence. Interrupting a 50-year silence between the publication of sonnets under the signatures of Mary Stuart and Mary Wroth, this set of sonnets registers the generic possibilities that might have been explored by early modern women poets had the casket sonnets been less successful as Protestant propaganda. Again linking the sonnet form to a female courtier with a sexual history subject to scandalous rumour, the Pandora sonnets reverse the dubious valencies of the genres of complaint and sonnet for the woman writer through their combination with familial elegy. They thus exploit their associations with legal redress to construct a successful public self-defence expressed in terms of decorous familial virtue. The collection makes clear, however, that the terms of such domestic status are not confined to the private domain of the household, but are embedded in wider cultural values. The speaker’s assertions of her maternal virtue are haunted by the possibility against which she writes: that the loss of a son challenges her place in familial hierarchies and destabilises her status in economic and political terms. The lack of reference to Anne de Vere as poet in the collection of memorial poems written after her death suggests, however, that a contemporary audience read Soowthern’s idiosyncratic exercises offered under the signatures of Anne de Vere and Elizabeth as part of his own textual bids for favour and political gain. This is particularly likely given that the sonnet attributed to Elizabeth is also couched in private terms but directed to the construction of her textual voice to fit Soowthern’s admonitory, political and religious project. As with the sonnets circulated under the signature of Mary Queen of Scots, the Pandora sonnets illuminate a set of generic possibilities for the textual construction of feminine lyric subjectivity, but these were still unavailable to historical early modern women writers in the medium of print.

4 The Politics of Withdrawal: Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and Lindamira’s Complaint

Josephine Roberts’ edition of the poems of Lady Mary Wroth has allowed the widespread dissemination of the sequences Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and Lindamira’s Complaint, and has been instrumental in establishing Wroth as both a primary example of the Renaissance woman poet and the major woman sonneteer of the English Renaissance. Coupled with the text of Wroth’s poems is Roberts’ account of the history of reception of the text. It is a narrative of women’s limited textual agency and constraint in the public sphere, which has received almost unquestioning acceptance and which has been disseminated as representative of the limitations placed on all Renaissance women’s publication of poetry.1 A key example of Roberts’ approach is provided in her construction of the Urania as a roman a` clef, in which she indicates that one episode, outlining the violent and coercive behaviour of the characters of Seralius and his father-in-law, was read by Edward Denny as an attack upon himself and his family. Denny responded with two letters and a poem of revenge, ‘To Pamphilia from the father-in-law of Seralius’, which begins by accusing Wroth of being a ‘Hermophradite in show’ and concludes by encouraging women’s textual silence and confinement to religious activity: ‘Work o th’ Workes leave idle bookes alone / For wise and worthyer women have writte none.’ Roberts records a poem written by Wroth in response as refusing Denny’s intimidation, but emphasizes his use of discourses of gender in his attack upon her by quoting from his letters a section recommending that Wroth ‘redeem the time with writing as large a volume of heavenly lays and holy love as you have of lascivious tales and amorous toys; that at the last you may 88

The Politics of Withdrawal 89

follow the example of your virtuous and learned aunt’. Roberts records that, specifically as a part of her response to Denny, Wroth ‘even wrote to the Duke of Buckingham’ defending her innocence, claiming to have stopped the sale of the text and seeking his aid in recovering the copies of Urania that had already been sold. The Urania was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 13 July 1621; by December 1621, as her letter to Buckingham indicates, Wroth claimed she was attempting to withdraw the Urania from sale. Roberts’ construction of the exchange is to position Wroth in the role of brave but powerless victim – ‘Despite Lady Mary Wroth’s show of courage, she was obliged to send letters to her friends for help’ – forced by Denny’s deployment of restrictive discourses of gender to withdraw her text from sale. This emphasis on Wroth’s lack of agency consistently shapes readings of the publication history of the text in later criticism. Both Kim Walker and Elaine Beilin repeat Roberts’ narrative of scandal and withdrawal. Indeed, they cite the same passages as Roberts selects in her introduction from Denny’s letters, those suggesting that Wroth follow the generic example of her aunt, the Countess of Pembroke.2 The themes of genderspecific attack and withdrawal have been taken up by Jeffrey Masten as not only characterizing the Urania’s circulation history, but also illustrating a theory of Renaissance women’s subjectivity. Masten links Wroth’s staged withdrawal of her texts from circulation with Pamphilia’s withdrawal into interiority in the sonnets: In writing to Buckingham, Wroth stages anxieties of publication in comparable spatial metaphors; the offending books – like Pamphilia herself in the sonnets and romance – she promises to ‘shut up’ and ‘gett in.’3 In Wendy Wall’s version of the Roberts’ narrative, Wroth’s publication of the Urania ‘met with scandal when Lord Edward Denny accused her of libel and demanded that the text be withdrawn’, not only because of the text’s topical allusions but as part of an attack on ‘female authorship in general’.4 Gary Waller’s reading does not have Denny demanding the text be withdrawn, but takes up Roberts’ emphasis on Denny’s deployment of discourses surrounding gender and genre as leading to the text’s suppression.5 Maureen Quilligan argues that ‘real political risks’ ensued from Wroth’s deviation from Mary Sidney’s example, but notes, as does Barbara Lewalski, that there is no evidence for the text’s suppression.6 Despite these alternative readings, the story of the Urania’s gender-driven suppression has also been seen to be generally available to

90 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

represent an early modern ‘taboo against the publication of women’, allowing Ellen Moody to conclude her article on the Anne Cecil de Vere sonnets by suggesting that the Urania and Pandora shared a similar publication history. Moody cites Wroth’s letter to the Duke of Buckingham as an example of ‘the response – one of humiliation and desperation – of a nearly contemporary woman sonneteer and the kinds of steps she was personally prepared to take to hunt out and destroy her work’.7 Before the appearance of Josephine Roberts’ edition of Wroth’s poems and her discovery of the Denny correspondence, critics presented a different narrative of the Urania’s contemporary reception, one with fewer direct links between discourses urging women’s silence or textual confinement to religious writings and Wroth’s withdrawal of the Urania from sale. Both May Paulissen and Bridget McCarthy cite a letter from John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton on 9 May 1623, almost two years after the Urania’s first publication, reporting Denny’s anger in response to the text.8 The date of this report suggests that Wroth’s efforts to withdraw the text from sale might pre-date Denny’s letters of attack, which a re-examination of the exchange of letters between Denny and Wroth confirms. Contrary to Roberts’ linear narrative, which posits Denny’s poem and letters as prompting Wroth’s letter to Buckingham about withdrawing the text, the exchange of letters between Denny and Wroth began exactly two months after Wroth informed Buckingham of her efforts to withdraw the text from sale. Wroth’s letter to Buckingham is dated 15 December 1621, and her first letter to Denny is dated 15 February 1621/2. In the letter to Denny, Wroth specifically states that Denny’s verses have come to her attention only recently: ‘This day came to my handes some verses under the name of the Lord Denny’s.’9 Although it is possible that the reference to ‘this day’ is a rhetorical trope, and Denny’s response to the Seralius episode was one of the ‘strang constructions’ that Wroth claims motivated her withdrawal of the text in her letter to Buckingham, the causal connection between the Wroth/Denny exchange and the withdrawal of the Urania from sale is much less certain than Roberts’ narrative of these events suggests. What then may be made of Wroth’s letter to Buckingham, written two months before Denny’s identification of the text as scandalous? Taken at face value, it registers a political expediency, a concern not ‘to give the least cause of offence’ in the face of the ‘strang constructions’ placed upon the text. However, Wroth’s protestations of innocence are problematic in the face of her text’s generic status as roman a` clef, following the model provided by Argenis: a genre that had as its defining feature encoded references to specific individuals and events that, inevitably,

The Politics of Withdrawal 91

were not uniformly complimentary. The Urania’s status as roman a` clef is consistently confirmed in contemporary references: Chamberlain writes to Carleton that Wroth ‘takes great libertie or rather licence to traduce whom she pleases;’ Sir George Manners writes to her in 1640 requesting a key to the text ‘that I may read with more delight’.10 It seems more likely that Wroth’s professed desire not to cause offence and to withdraw the text from sale is an insurance policy, directed to Buckingham, a locus of significant power within the court. It attempts to enlist the protection of the favourite of the king. Wroth’s rhetorical disassociation from the text allows her to officially position herself as innocent of both offence and a desire for publication, while still allowing the text to circulate.11 Contrary to the assumption generated by Roberts’ narrative and reproduced by later critics, no evidence exists to suggest that Wroth’s letter to Buckingham seeking the text’s withdrawal from sale resulted in the text’s suppression. There is no record of issue of a warrant by James I to that effect and no further reference in any subsequent correspondence to Wroth’s efforts to recall it; she later writes a substantial continuation in manuscript. The text’s suppression itself is therefore as uncertain as the gender-driven cause of that suppression. The narrative that asserts Wroth’s withdrawal of her text from sale as gender-driven also largely discounts Wroth’s textual response to Denny’s attack because it problematizes any neat account of the suppression of women’s writing.12 Wroth sends Denny a poem imitating his, in which she takes the model of male rationality in the same way as Denny takes the model of female chastity, and there finds a site to base a monstrous confusion of gender, with Denny as a ‘Hirmophradite in sense’.13 Nor is a narrative of silence suggested by Wroth’s deployment of the materials of their correspondence. Her first letter to Lord Denny, accompanied by her answering poem, carries with it an implicit threat to circulate their letters and poems in her defence: I send your Lordship your owne lines, (as they were called to mee) reversed; and the first coppyi; as desiring your owne eyes should bee first witnesse of your reward for your poetrie, if it were yours. This is the course I take yet; although your Lordship certainlie knowes, I may take others; and am not by this barred from anie.14 The reference to the ‘first’ copy implies that others may be circulated, if the later threat of other courses of action were not sufficient. Denny’s letter of response indicates how seriously he took Wroth’s threat of circulation and what such a threat meant in playing for the stakes of

92 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

royal favour. His letter interpolates into his defence two panegyric references to James I: the first is to James as a ‘Wise King and Prince’, while the second enlists the monarch’s approval as the motive for Denny’s self-defence, lest Wroth’s letters might condemn him ‘as a scorn to the eyes of my dread and dear soveraigne and master’.15 Given Wroth’s threat of circulation, these flattering references to James I seem self-protective strategies inserted by Denny should the correspondence reach the king. Wroth’s later letter to Sir William Fielding, Earl of Denbigh, puts her threat into action, sending a set of documents to him in order that his ‘favor may make all well with his Majestie’: I presume to send thes things unto you, unfitt for your most judisiall eyes to beehold, and goodnes to read; and unseemly for mee to pubblish if innocensy guarded mee nott, butt cleerness in some part as never meant [to] him, and faulshood on his syde in his accusation concerning drink, makes me [willingly] cast my self upon the same Jury hee taulks of, and from thence humbly to beseech right, I can nott meritt any such favor butt by Loyallty, and truth, which may, and shall speake justly for mee, your favor may make all well with his Majestie:16 Denny’s reference to Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, as an admonitory example of decorous textual activity for a woman, the only quotation from Denny’s letters included in Roberts’ introduction, occurs at the end of Denny’s first letter to Wroth. Although used by Denny as one weapon among others in his attack upon Wroth, the example of Mary Sidney was insufficient to deter Wroth from circulating the letter as part of her defence. Rather than the final and oppressive statement of the correspondence, as implied by Roberts, the example was only one part of an attack vigorously defended by Wroth and taken by her from the level of private correspondence to wider circles of manuscript circulation.

‘Bard . . . of Light’: Spenserian negotiations in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus The narrative of the text’s withdrawal has fed into critical approaches towards both the prose romance and the sonnet sequence. It has influenced criticism of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus most notably in Jeffrey Masten’s influential article, which connects Wroth’s withdrawal of the text from sale and Pamphilia’s withdrawal of her body from the systems

The Politics of Withdrawal 93

of homosocial male traffic in women that underpin the construction of the traditional, male Petrarchan subject.17 This refusal to circulate delineates an alternative space for the construction of a nascent female subjectivity, a space characterized by its interiority and privacy. Both Gary Waller and Wendy Wall cite Masten’s account as a gloss upon their own analyses. Wall celebrates that ‘the reader of her text has the rare opportunity to hear the silent mistress of the sonnet sequences finally speak’, but constructs women’s adoption of the position of speaker in such a way that it amounts to ‘generically cross dressing as a male sonneteer’. In Wall’s terms that sonnet speaker, even in the brief moment of her articulation, ‘self-consciously meditates on the dilemma of what cannot be said’, taking as her theme the restrictions of poetic discourse that are played out in Wall’s version of the text’s reception history. ‘Silence, absence and vacancy’ also characterize for Wall the speaker’s construction of her own subjectivity. At the heart of Wall’s theories of a rent and vacant female subjectivity in Wroth’s sonnets is the direction of the subject’s gaze. By refusing to blazon the male beloved’s body, or to construct him as the mirrored surface of the speaker’s own self-regard according to male-authored Petrarchan convention, the subject is seen as withdrawing completely from the public aspects of the Petrarchan tradition: ‘Wroth seems to expel almost completely the realm of the visible and public world.’18 Waller’s account of Wroth’s sequence returns to the same question, that of the woman subject’s appropriation of the male Petrarchan subject’s lines of sight. Central to his thesis of women’s struggle into discourse in the period is that their culturally inscribed positioning as the object of the male subject’s gaze problematizes their reversed occupation of the male subject position to such an extent that ‘in fact it institutionalizes a wholesale gagging of women readers and writers’: At times Pamphilia is ‘molested’ by her role as an object of the desiring gaze; at others she tries to escape the gaze of lover and other people’s, in loneliness, isolation or sleep. Such reactions are attempts to avoid the repetitive constructing of sexual relations by patterns of male desire and domination and female submission. In such relationships the values of the patriarchal male predominate: they emerge as the urge to overwhelm, penetrate, defeat and triumph over.19 Against this overwhelming and pervasive male presence, an apt reinforcement of Wall’s theories of an absent and vacant female subjectivity, Waller locates one sonnet as a counter-example of Pamphilia’s

94 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

appropriation of the pleasure and power of the male gaze: ‘Take heed mine eyes, how you your lookes do cast.’ He also analyzes the sonnet in terms of ‘the fantasy of emulation’, but it remains for Waller a moment where ‘Wroth’s poems record the stirrings – against enormous odds, it needs to be stressed – to establish an equivalent female subject position’, one of the ‘points of strain and contradiction where alternatives are struggling to emerge’.20 The identification of the sequence as an excursion into interiority, and thus as a private text, represents an increasingly consistent approach towards Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. It informs both Kim Walker’s rejection of Elaine Beilin’s ‘spiritual’ reading of the sonnets in favour of their representation of the gendered speaker’s ‘conflicted subject position’, and Mary B. Moore’s modification of Masten’s argument to allow a limited agency to the woman sonneteer just by articulating early modern female interiority in terms of its limitations: ‘Far from denying female subjectivity, Wroth depicts a female sense of self through the labyrinth – presenting a self that is isolated, enclosed, complex.’21 A similar argument is approached with more complexity by Christine Luckyj, in which Pamphilia’s silence is invoked as a site of feminine agency, ‘superior to the rhetorical excess of men’, part of Wroth’s ‘subversive’ application of injunctions of feminine silence to, conversely, enable early modern women’s ‘speech’.22 Earlier critics showed some concern for the text’s operation in the public domain; however, the narrative of gendered suppression influentially argued for by Roberts, Masten, Wall and Waller and taken up by more recent critics excludes Wroth from such mechanisms.23 These analyses focus instead upon the text’s interiority and textual strategies of enclosure as a gendered intervention into the genre that is defined as different and feminized by its private status. Both Wall and Waller construct Wroth’s entry into the sonnet sequence in terms of monolithic and male-coded structures that allow a female subjectivity to be constructed only in terms of absence, or momentarily and ‘against enormous odds’, because they construct the history of women’s lyric agency preceding Wroth’s sequence in terms of absence. It is a feature of almost all readings of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus that critics begin by augmenting the text’s value by pointing to its anomalous status and its originality.24 Yet a Jacobean poet such as Wroth is participating in a genre that is not everywhere coded as male, and in a wider lyric tradition offering a range of precedents for women’s construction of a specifically female subjectivity. While the history of sonnet sequences attributed to women and adopting strategies for the construction of a female subjectivity is far from a

The Politics of Withdrawal 95

coherent or widely available one, especially in comparison with the male-authored tradition, its existence suggests that women’s participation in secular or male-coded genres was not as difficult as has been assumed. By 1621, Mary Wroth had available to her a wide tradition of women’s secular writing of lyrics and texts that presented precedents for the construction of the female speaker or subject. The widespread circulation in print of sonnet sequences attributed to Mary Stuart was supplemented by Elizabeth I’s Petrarchan poetry, circulated in manuscript and print, the Continental tradition of women’s sonnet writing and a tradition of male- and female-authored complaint. As this history shows, while the Petrarchan lyric, the sonnet sequence and the complaint were all genres that, when viewed as exclusively male-authored traditions, encoded specific gender ideologies in their construction of the male subject, and which thus problematized the woman author’s direct assumption of their speaking positions, they were also all genres appropriated by the woman writer or female voice using a variety of complex and unpredictable strategies. As Heather Dubrow has argued, some critical constructions of the relationship of gender and genre have produced oversimplifications, producing monolithic female versions of genres that belie the complexity of local textual practice.25 Wroth’s explicit construction of her sequence in terms of an existing history of female lyric subjectivity is borne out by the direct associations that the Urania draws between the female subject of Pamphila to Amphilanthus and Elizabeth I. As Elaine Beilin has identified, the second book of the Urania presents Pamphilia as married to the state by her father in a move that precludes all other suitors, clearly linking Pamphilia with Elizabeth’s rhetoric of marriage to her kingdom.26 An equally strong connection is drawn between Elizabeth and Pamphilia in their parallel construction as female Petrarchan poets, a connection that locates in Elizabeth’s textual agency a site of precedent and agency open to later women poets seeking to write using secular genres. However, the correspondences between them are not direct: the figure of Elizabeth cannot be mapped straight upon that of Pamphilia. Pamphilia’s Petrarchan performance far exceeds Elizabeth’s, and the Urania’s status as a Jacobean text written by an increasingly marginal figure within that court means that it is inflected with a set of discourses that distinctly separate it from Elizabeth’s textual practice. The generic choice of the Elizabethan sonnet sequence in this Jacobean context carries with it a specific and distinct set of meanings, one of which is that the sequence formally inscribes a nostalgia for the Elizabethan period while reinforcing the speaker’s withdrawal from the court of her own time. Rather than an

96 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

expression of a private rejection of the courtly life in general, a withdrawal into interiority within the bounds of a genre specifically coded to another period implies a pointed and public rejection of the present court in favour of that period. In Poem 26, ‘When every one to pleasing pastime hies’, the speaker sets herself apart from the typical pastimes of the Jacobean court. This withdrawal is repeatedly cited in critical accounts of the construction of a feminine subjectivity in terms of an exclusion from Petrarchan discourse. But the sonnet also politicizes that withdrawal: the speaker critically represents court pastimes as ‘voyd of right’, ‘poore vanities’ when contrasted with ‘true pleasure’.27 In this move, Wroth capitalizes through genre upon a cultural nostalgia for the ‘golden age’ of Elizabethan rule and turns it, through the discourses of withdrawal and banishment, to an expression of disenfranchisement from Jacobean rule. The text also positions itself with reference to the past at levels beyond its generic unfashionability through specific references to courtly events such as the Masque of Blackness performed in 1608, and embedded references to its place in a Sidneian textual tradition inseparable from a contemporary, Protestant religious and political agenda advocated by the radical Spenserians. Not only have these aspects of the sequence been neglected, but the resonance that they might have in the historical context in which Wroth’s text was written and published provides a sense of the text’s own political and religious position within that period. Although the sequence opens with an emphasis on night, blackness and withdrawal, the first section of the sequence concludes with an increasing emphasis upon display, the speaker’s grief transformed in Poem 48 into ‘this stage of woe’. This increasing resistance to interiority culminates in the final sonnet of the first section, marked off by the signature Pamphilia, in which the burning heart enclosed within the speaker’s breast in the opening sonnet becomes a generative force of display, almost consuming the interior subject: How like a fire doth love increase in mee, The longer that itt lasts, the stronger still, The greater purer, brighter, and doth fill Noe eye with wunder more, then hopes still bee Bred in my brest, when fires of love are free To use that part to theyr best pleasing will, And now impossible itt is to kill The heat soe great wher Love his strength doth see.

The Politics of Withdrawal 97

Mine eyes can scarce sustaine the flames my hart Doth trust in them my passions to impart, And languishingly strive to show my love; My breath nott able is to breathe least part Of that increasing fuell of my smart; Yett love I will till I butt ashes prove. (P55) The sonnet sets up an anti-blazon of the speaker’s own body – ‘my brest’, ‘mine eyes’, ‘my breath’ – increasingly subsumed by the force of love; but even this physical consumption is recruited to support the speaker’s display of an exemplary constancy: ‘Yett love I will till I butt ashes prove.’ This dynamic of consumption and renewal, coupled with imagery of fire and ash, and a final assertion of the survival of a textual identity in the face of change or death, all recall the phoenix imagery surrounding Philip and Mary Sidney in the 1590s. The image of the phoenix, most conspicuously an emblem associated with Elizabeth I, was also used by Philip Sidney in Astrophil and Stella, and became increasingly associated with Sidney after his death as an image of his enduring status as poet and Protestant icon, an image that transcended his physical death. Mary Sidney uses the image herself in ‘To the Angell spirit of the most excellent Sir Philip Sidney’, the second of two dedicatory poems to her brother prefacing the edition of the psalms that she revised and completed after his death: ‘Phoenix thou wert, so rare thy fairest minde.’28 The poem later depicts him in heaven in the privileged position of singing ‘thy Makers praise’. This image implies a proximity to God for both the psalmist and the Protestantism he advocated, and promotes his existing works in an increasingly hostile environment at court: ‘as here thy workes so worthilie enbrac’t / By all of worth, where never Envie bites’. However, largely because of her role in continuing to promote her brother and the Protestant cause at court, the image of the phoenix also began to be attached to Mary Sidney herself. As Margaret Hannay has argued, other contemporary constructions of Mary Sidney represent her as embodying her brother’s spirit without the use of the phoenix image, but with reference to the ideas of renewal after death that underpin phoenix typology.29 I am suggesting that, through this phoenix imagery, the Urania sequence may be signalling a specific connection with a political, Elizabethan and Sidneian tradition that positions Wroth as a successor to Mary Sidney, who died in the year of the Urania’s publication. The name of the text itself signals this connection. Spenser, who initiated the formulation of Philip Sidney as ideal Protestant writer and courtier and Mary Sidney as his

98 Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

successor in a dedicatory sonnet in the Faerie Queene, repeats this construction in Colin Clouts Come Home Again through a figuring of Philip Sidney as Astrophil and Mary Sidney as Astrophil’s sister Urania, the muse of Christian poetry.30 Mary Sidney’s assumption of the identity of Philip’s phoenix is peculiarly open, because of her gender, to a second identification as Urania, an identity in which she received a number of dedications in devotional works. The text’s title, apparently privileging a relatively marginal figure in the romance over its central protagonist Pamphilia, registers in this displacement a positioning of the text as part of this gendered Protestant tradition centred around Mary Sidney. The prose text of the Urania contains an epitaph to the lady Myra, an anagram of Mary, which also uses the phoenix imagery associated with Mary Sidney; it places a religious gloss upon the conventional praise of her virtues by including faith among them, and by representing her death as the will of Heaven: Egypts Pyramids inclose their Kings, But this farr braver, nobler things; Vertue, Beauty, Love, Faith, all heere lye Kept in Myras Tombe, shut from eye: The Phoenix dyes to raise another faire, Borne of her ashes, to be heire; So this sweete Place may claime that right in woe, Since heere she lyes, Heaven willing so.31 Importantly, this poem feminizes its image of both the phoenix and her successor, ‘another faire, / Borne of her ashes’. This is in contrast to the representation of the myth in Metamorphoses: Then from his father’s body is reborn A little Phoenix, so they say, to live The same long years. When time has built his strength With power to raise the wight, he lifts the nest – The nest his cradle and his father’s tomb – As love and duty prompt, from that tall palm And carries it across the sky to reach The Sun’s great city, and before the doors Of the Sun’s holy temple lays it down.32 In a Jacobean context, where the iconography of the sun was associated with James in the same way as that of the moon had been with

The Politics of Withdrawal 99

Elizabeth, another element of the phoenix myth takes on a new significance: the phoenix’s duty to offer her predecessor’s legacy to the king. For Wroth, positioned through Pamphilia and the epigraph to Myra as the phoenix-like inheritrix of Mary Sidney, that legacy is a history of Protestant activism within the court, expressed either through the publication of texts designed to promote the Protestant cause, or through the related project of sustaining the myth of Philip Sidney as Protestant hero.33 The year of the Urania’s publication, 1621, marked a period of crisis in James’ reign centred on his cautious, non-interventionist policy in Europe and a resurgence of Protestant activism in the Jacobean court in support of the Princess Elizabeth and the Continental Protestant cause. The major textual proponents of the Protestant position in this crisis were the group of poets identified as Spenserian in this context by their shared defence of the public, instructive role of poetry and the prophetic independence of the poet against what was seen to be the hostile culture of the Jacobean court. Although the group was not always ideologically coherent, they generally supported a Protestant religious agenda which found literary expression in the characterization of Elizabeth’s reign as a lost golden world that embodied the patriotic and Protestant ideals perceived to be absent from the Jacobean court.34 An earlier crisis in the English court in 1613–14, when again an imminent war on the Continent led to Protestant fears that the Jacobean court was dominated by pro-Spanish factions, led to the first consistent formulations of this nostalgia in the form of pastoral poetry by a group that David Norbrook identifies as loosely including William Browne, Christopher Brooke, Samuel Daniel, John Davies, Michael Drayton, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Fulke Greville, Joshua Sylvester and George Wither.35 They in turn identified themselves with a group of aristocratic Protestant patrons perceived to be independent of courtly corruption and intrigue, often identified in terms of a physical withdrawal from the court to the country. This group included a distinct sub-group of women courtiers: Susan Herbert, Countess of Montgomery; Lucy Harington, the Countess of Bedford and Lady Mary Wroth. Wroth was the object of a set of Spenserian dedications. The most populist and politically inflammatory of the Spenserians was George Wither, who included Wroth among the other Protestant patrons to whom he dedicated his 1613 satire Abuses Stript and Whipt. In this volume he distinguishes his conventional praise of Wroth’s virtues by associating them with truth – ‘true unfained Vertues’ – and identifying her as active patron of the arts.36 The text contained thinly disguised attacks on corruption in the court, and its inflammatory content

100

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

resulted in Wither’s imprisonment in 1614. Two less controversial Protestant poets dedicated texts to Wroth during this period: Joshua Sylvester in Lachrimae Lachrimarum (1612) and George Chapman in his translation of the Twelve Bookes of the Iliads (1609). In sharp contrast to the conventional sonnet to the Countess of Montgomery’s virtue, that prefaces his translation, Chapman’s sonnet to Wroth positions her as a new star ‘Discouered in our Sydneian Asterisme’, an advocate of a ‘true Reason, and Religion’ in opposition to ‘the times Apostasie’, and as a figure pursuing a separate path from her corrupt contemporaries: ‘Then shun their course, faire Starre; / And still keepe your way, pure, and circular.’37 Sylvester’s dedicatory sonnet presents Wroth in the same Sidneian terms, as ‘Sidnie¨des / In whom, her Uncle’s noble Veine renewes.’38 The year of the Urania’s publication marked a resurgence of the textual activities of this group of writers in response to the new crisis on the Continent. In 1621, George Wither published, and was again imprisoned for, his satire Wither’s Motto. The second part of Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, published in 1622, contains a panegyric to Ralegh, an important figure in the Protestant ‘golden age’, who was executed in 1618 as part of James’ policies of appeasement with Spain. In the years preceding 1620, Mary Wroth’s literary status as a patron of this group was reactivated through the publication of a number of collected editions of their work, editions that reproduced the earlier dedications, positioning Wroth as a Sidneian, Protestant patron.39 Although Wroth was increasingly less involved with the court, her retirement was not absolute; diaries and letters indicate that she was still active in the Sidney and Herbert circles that formed a locus of support for Protestant politics.40 The Countess of Montgomery was herself a Protestant patron: Robert Newton’s short Protestant prose tract, The Countess of Mountgomeries Evsebeia, was dedicated to her in 1620, and Donne accompanied a sermon that she had requested with a letter that makes their relationship of patron and client clear.41 However, the dedications made separately to Susan Herbert and Mary Wroth are quite different: those addressed to the Countess of Montgomery position her as a patron to a general body of Protestant writers, but those addressed to Wroth issue from a more specific, marginal and oppositional body of Spenserian writers. This connection of Wroth with the Spenserians is reinforced by the use of John Grismand and John Marriott as the Urania’s publishers, and Augustine Mathewes as its printer. The Spenserian poets consistently used this combination of printer and publisher.42 They were also the printer and publishers implicated in the marginal and radical status of

The Politics of Withdrawal 101

the texts that they produced – in 1621, they were fined for printing Wither’s Motto without a licence. Their questionable reputation has usually been recruited to arguments for the Urania’s publication without Wroth’s permission.43 However, the Urania’s publishers and printer might reflect its own political position as part of this group of Spenserian texts. The positioning of the text and its speaker in terms of the typology associated with Mary Sidney, Urania and the feminized phoenix, as well as Wroth’s patronage of the group of Spenserian poets also concerned with the textual continuation of an idealized, Elizabethan Protestantism within which Mary and Philip Sidney were central figures, suggests that the Urania might itself be read as a Spenserian text. However, Wroth’s alignment with the radical Spenserian poets is qualified by the constant tension constructed in the sequence between the private and the public spheres. Poem 40 centres around an analogy drawn between false hope in love and the false rule of tyrants. The speaker’s private experience works as a point of entry into a commentary upon the political practice of capricious favouritism by an absolutist ruler: Faulce hope which feeds butt to destroy, and spill What itt first breeds; unaturall to the birth Of thine owne wombe; conceaving butt to kill, And plenty gives to make the greater dearth, Soe Tirants doe who faulsly ruling earth Outwardly grace them, and with profitts fill Advance those who appointed are to death To make theyr greater falle to please theyr will. Thus shadow they theyr wicked vile intent Coulering evill with a show of good While in faire showes theyr malice soe is spent; Hope kills the hart, and tirants shed the blood. For hope deluding brings us to the pride Of our desires the farder downe to slide. While it is difficult to characterize such a sonnet in terms of a gendered refusal of the public sphere, the register of the speaker’s engagement with the political is muted in comparison with some male-authored sequences of the period. The politics of the sequence align more closely with the ambivalence towards courtly life associated with

102

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

Tacitism, a movement closely aligned with the Sidney circle. A library catalogue and a set of commonplace books kept by Robert Sidney reveal the family interest in writers within a Machiavellian tradition, containing works by Polybius, Livy, Tacitus and Machiavelli, as do their contacts with figures concerned with the translation of Tacitean texts and the dissemination of Tacitean political thought.44 Fulke Greville, part of the Sidney circle of coterie readers, expresses his disaffection with the court in more explicit and personalized terms. The sequence Caelica closes with a poem identifying the sovereign as the incarnation of impiety, and contains in sonnets 77–83 a set of political poems dealing with the abuse of power by ‘our moderne Tyrants’. In particular, Greville’s Sonnet 83 analyzes the recurrent themes of the rise of court favourites and the speaker’s exclusion from favour in typically explicit terms: Like as the Kings forlorne, depos’d from their estate Yet cannot choose but loue the Crowne, although new Kings they hate: If they doe plead their right, nay, if they onely liue, Offences to the Crowne alike their Good and Ill shall giue; So (I would I were not) because I may complaine, And cannot choose but loue my Wrongs, and ioy to Wish in vaine; This faith condemneth me, my right doth rumor moue, I may not know the cause I fell, nor yet without cause loue.45 A similar analysis of the subject’s resistant relationship to tyrannical power occurs in Poem 8 of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. But the poem is couched in the terms of courtly love in a mocking address to Cupid, and concludes: ‘Yett this Sir God, your boyship I dispise; / Your charmes I obey, butt love not want of eyes.’ The difference in register and force of critique between the texts by Wroth and Greville stands as a caveat against positioning Pamphilia to Amphilanthus too emphatically with the Spenserians. The focus of the sequence upon love, and its consistent use of erotic diction and metaphor, dilutes its political engagement by embedding its criticism in erotic discourse. This strategy of moderation may be gender-driven, but may also qualify the text’s radical Spenserian stance towards the court with the mixed attraction and criticism of Sidneian Tacitism. The sonnet ‘Like to the Indians, scorched with the sunne’ brings this ambivalence into focus. It is centred upon contemporary associations of the typology of the sun with James:

The Politics of Withdrawal 103

Like to the Indians, scorched with the sunne, The sunn which they doe as theyr God adore So ame I us’d by love, for ever more I worship him, less favors have I wunn, Better are they who thus to blacknes runn, And soe can only whitenes want deplore Then I who pale, and white ame with griefs store, Nor can have hope, butt to see hopes undunn; Beesids theyr sacrifies receavd’s in sight Of theyr chose sainte: Mine hid as worthles rite; Grant mee to see wher I my offrings give, Then lett mee weare the marke of Cupids might In hart as they in skin of Phoebus light Nott ceasing offrings to love while I Live. (P25) The poem reactivates the imagery of the Masque of Blackness to make this a text less about erotic love than about methods of worship and their operation in the Jacobean court. The Masque of Blackness, in which Mary Wroth performed, was written by Jonson; but its thematic material and specifically the identification of the masquers with the daughters of Ethiop were incorporated at Queen Anne’s request. The masque oscillates between a representation of blackness as beautiful in its own right, a reflection of the sun’s ‘fervent’st love’, and its representation as alien and inferior when seeking incorporation into the fair Britannia.46 As Hardin Aasand argues, the masque concludes with a troubling ambiguity: the daughters of Niger are neither made literally fair through the sun’s favour nor fair through a redefinition of the value of their blackness. This ambiguity is thus transferred in the masque to an uncertainty surrounding the power attributed to James and the success of his policies of union in including the other within the rhetoric of nationhood.47 In Wroth’s sonnet (P25), the speaker identifies herself with the Indians, ‘scorched with the sunne, / The sunn which they doe as theyr God adore’, in a process that defines them as marked and damaged by their religious practice. But the associations of this sonnet with the imagery of the Masque of Blackness mean that for the speaker, the punishing sun is identified with James rather than a religious God. This is a figuration of the sovereign that quickly and self-protectively elides with an image of Cupid or love, while repeating the theme of disenfranchisement from favour through worship: ‘for ever more / I worship

104

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

him, less favors have I wunn’. The sonnet shifts its alignments in the second quatrain, however, to a more traditional alignment of blackness with others – ‘they who thus to blacknes runn’ – against whom the speaker seeks to define herself, here again in terms of an exclusion from the sun: ‘I who pale, and white ame with griefs store.’ As Kim Hall argues, associations in literature of the period between blackness and paganism were available to Protestant anti-Catholic rhetoric.48 Wroth’s sonnet aligns itself with this typology by setting up in the sestet a distinction between those whose ‘sacrifies’ are received ‘in sight / Of theyr chose sainte’, and the speaker, for whom religious display must remain ‘hid as worthles rite’. Ultimately, religious belief is redefined as an internal and private mark of faith, worn ‘in hart’, in keeping with Protestant doctrine. Yet at points the sonnet seems to resist this model of Protestantism; the speaker, like the Indians with whom she at first identifies, harbours a residual desire to make offerings even as she defines herself against those who may do so. This ambivalence produces a sense of caution, a wariness against a self-positioning in radical opposition either to ‘they in skin of Phoebus light’ or to Phoebus himself, which is consistent with the sonnet’s cautious embedding of its religious complaint within an erotic discourse. The same ambivalence towards James’s power concludes the Masque of Blackness, and is mobilized here through exactly this convergence of the erotic and religious. According to contemporary representations of James as Solomon, his relationship with the dark and comely bride enlarged to become the exemplar of Christ’s love refracted through the divinely elected king: ‘she becomes fair through God’s favour’.49 However, this association of James and Solomon also carried the negative connotations of an excessive corporeal sensuality, coupled with Protestant fears centred upon the marriage negotiations between Prince Charles and the Spanish Infanta, an unrecuperated foreign woman in the English court. Thus the speaker posits her fairness first in terms of damage and exclusion – ‘scorched with the sunne’ – and disenfranchised from worship, then in terms of an idealized Protestant self-fashioning with the ‘marke of Cupids might / In hart’. Her lack of favour with the sovereign despite such constructions implies that the power invested in God’s representative on earth has been wrongly directed. But the equivalence of her own internal marking with the ambiguous image of a ‘skin of Phoebus light’, either dark like the Indians or made light through reference to the Song of Songs, leaves open the potential for the sovereign’s right exercise of power, operating in concordance with the speaker’s religious agenda.

The Politics of Withdrawal 105

The gender of the speaker and beloved in this sequence operates in the opposite configuration to private enclosure; this enables the male figure of the beloved to be attributed with a range of different subject positions that register his mobility and multi-valency in the Jacobean court, and allows the sequence to address more than the private relationship of poet and idealized beloved. As Montrose and others have shown, the same aspects of the genre were taken up in the Elizabethan court through the placement of Elizabeth as sonnet-mistress. Thus, further to its inscription of a nostalgia for an Elizabethan ‘golden age’, Wroth’s use of the genre of the sonnet sequence in the Jacobean period capitalizes upon the same availability of the male sovereign to be positioned with the beloved, as sonnet-master, by a female speaker. This in turn enables love to be used as a political discourse, in a bid for a particularized kind of royal favour and a complaint against its denial. The shifting associations of James, Phoebus, Cupid and the speaker’s beloved in ‘Like to the Indians, scorched with the sunne’ provide a template for the construction of the male beloved throughout the sequence, and is shown most clearly in Wroth’s constant references to the Court of Love and the Anacreontic Cupid.50 The political value of these shifting constructions of the male beloved becomes clear in one discrete group of sonnets: the frequently anthologized corona in the second section of the sequence, which situates the power of bestowing sovereignty with the poet, rather than with the divinely elected sovereign. The court represented in this group of poems is a utopian vision of a place where a right love is valorized in religious terms: Love is the shining starr of blessings light; The fervent fire of zeale, the roote of peace, The lasting lampe fed with the oyle of right; Image of fayth, and wombe for joyes increase. (P78) This court is presided over by a monarch of light, untouched by ‘staine’ or ‘spott’, whose rule is characterized by fairness, justice, truth and constancy: Please him, and serve him, glory in his might, And firme hee’ll bee, as innosencye white, Cleere as th’ayre, warme as sunn beames, as day light, Just as truthe, constant as fate, joy’d to requite, Then love obay, strive to observe his might, And bee in his brave court a glorious light.

106

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

This ideal court provides a new frame of reference for the speaker’s selfcharacterization in terms of phoenix-like body, consumed by and emitting light. It is a characterization that she places against a vision of Revelation in the fourth sonnet of the corona: Never to slack till earth noe stars can see, Till Sunn, and Moone doe leave to us dark night, And secound Chaose once againe doe free Us, and the world from all devisions spite, (P80)51 But until then, the burning of love becomes a way for the faithful to abolish sin and fear and to replace them ‘with vertues which inspire / Soules with devine love, which showes his chaste art,’ (P81). This concern with apocalyptic themes signals Wroth’s alignment with a shift in Protestant apocalyptic thinking, according to which the date of the apocalypse was no longer seen as vague but as imminent; Thomas Brightman suggested 1650, while John Harrison, whose edition of The Messiah Already Come was first published in 1613, suggested a date as close as 1630.52 A concern with the apocalypse was reflected in the imagery of radical Protestant texts, figured in part through the female figure of Aletheia, the representation of apocalyptic truth. In Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals, she is represented as wandering in exile, much like Wroth’s Pamphilia, although in Browne’s text that exile is characterized in terms of specific sites of abbey, court and town rather than Wroth’s less material space of erotic absence and exclusion.53 A draft of an unperformed masque celebrating the Palatine match used Aletheia as the central figure as part of an apocalyptic vision of a final, international reunion of Protestants; the muses sing before her a song promoting the union of sovereigns following the model of the English king, under whom foreign religions are subordinated to the true religion.54 Although the Protestant agenda of Wroth’s text is less overt, and is directed to a model of right government within the English court rather than an internationalist vision, the speaker can be seen to be taking up the Spenserian positioning of Aletheia as exile, source of purging flame, and the embodiment of truth in the face of apocalypse. In Wroth’s text, this apocalyptic imagery is ostensibly attributed to Cupid, yet through an overtly biblical frame that offers a model of right government in a fictional court. The corona shifts to present the consequences for a male subject who fails to construct himself in these terms: ‘Hee that shuns love doth love him self the less / And cursed hee whos spiritt nott admires / The worth of love’ (P83). ‘He’, now specifically

The Politics of Withdrawal 107

Cupid, is re-placed in Poem 85 in the context of the court of his mother, Venus, which is represented as the anti-type of the utopian court that the speaker has envisaged under her son, a place of ‘follyes’ and ‘stile of love who hath lasiviouse bin’. It provides an admonitory counter-example to the idealized court that the speaker bestows upon the ‘Great King of Love’ as idealized servant, and indeed recalls the troubled Scottish court of James’ own mother. But any implicit criticism of a Jacobean court ‘imbracing loose desires and wanton play’ (P95) is strategically distanced by its displacement onto a feminized frame. The tension set up between the ideal and its opposite, still abstracted to the level of the Court of Love, finds a less mythological focus in the final sonnet of the corona. In this poem, the speaker represents both her gift of the crown of a court characterized in divine terms, and herself as a rejected and undervalued servant. Here the pun on ‘worthles’ suggests that the court of envy and jealousy in which this occurs is aligned with that of her own Jacobean experience: Except my hart which you beestow’d before, And for a signe of conquest gave away As worthles to bee kept in your choyse store Yett one more spotles with you doth nott stay. The tribute which my hart doth truly pay Is faith untouch’d, pure thoughts discharge the score Of debts for mee, wher constancy bears sway, And rules as Lord, unharm’d by envyes sore, Yett other mischiefs faile nott to attend, As enimies to you, my foes must bee; Curst jealousie doth all her forces bend To my undoing; thus my harmes I see. Soe though in Love I fervently doe burne, In this strange labourinth how shall I turne? (P90) The corona finishes by recruiting the speaker’s idealized self-construction to a bid for personal favour. This takes the form of a complaint against her exclusion through the forces of ‘Curst jealousie’. As Ann Rosalind Jones has noted, the sonnet has a strong element of local, political selfinterest: ‘As enimies to you, my foes must bee.’55 But this element of material self-interest, typical of the complaint, is coupled with references to the speaker’s earlier self-construction as an embodiment of

108

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

divine virtue, ‘in his brave court a gloriouse light’ (P80). This enlarges the speaker’s bid for personal favour to a bid for the institution of her utopian and godly court in a specifically Jacobean context: here the phoenix offers her Protestant legacy to the king. The final section of the sequence re-places the speaker in exile, ‘Disdaining light wher Cupid, and the race / Of Lovers are dispisde, and shame shines cleere’ (P100). At one level, though, her exile is now from a corrupted court in which she has little investment, and at another from an impossible court of her own fictional making, leaving her, as she puns, ‘bard of . . . light’ (P100); a typically Spenserian exile and divine poet. In a Petrarchan context, a poetic position very different from that of the Elizabethan sonneteers is worked out in these sections of the sequence, clearly expressed in the last sonnet (P103): My muse now hapy, lay thy self to rest, Sleepe in the quiett of a faithfull love, Write you noe more, butt lett thes phant’sies move Some other harts, wake nott to new unrest, Butt if you study, bee those thoughts adrest To truth, which shall eternall goodnes prove; Injoying of true joye, the most, and best, The endles gaine which never will remove; Leave the discource of Venus, and her sunn To young beeginers, and theyr brains inspire With storys of great love, and from that fire Gett heat to write the fortunes they have wunn, And thus leave off, what’s past showes you can love, Now lett your constancy your honor prove, Pamphilia Conventional erotic Petrarchan poetry is seen as the province of ‘young beginners’. The ‘storys of great love’, on the other hand, are equivalent in the imagery of the sequence to a divine love, which the speaker has previously positioned herself as writing. Implicitly, her own text is set up as an exemplary model to other writers: it renews the phoenix imagery of self-generating ‘fire’ in a textual as well as a religious context, and transfers the example of Mary Sidney through her own text to a wider audience of ‘some other harts’. The concluding sonnet returns Petrarchan erotic discourse from a secular to a religious frame, but in

The Politics of Withdrawal 109

a move itself typically Petrarchan it also promotes the poet’s own work. In a sense, nothing could be further from Masten’s characterization of the sequence in terms of withdrawal from circulation. Wroth is positioning her sequence both in a wide political and religious frame, and a Protestant literary tradition integrating both Sidneiean and radical Spenserian agendas.56

‘I thus goe arm’d to field’: Lindamira’s Complaint This impulse towards courtly reinstatement, displaced in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus to the court of love, is given a more specific political and personal resonance in the complaint narratives surrounding the figure of Lindamira. In the sequence Lindamira’s Complaint, interpolated into the prose romance of the Urania, Wroth activates both personal and Protestant political agendas. She deploys the autobiographical shadowings of the complaint genre to mount a self-interested defence of her value as courtier within a contemporary Jacobean milieu. Constructed in terms of both Spenserian exclusion and Sidneian pre-eminence, the complaint exploits the genre’s dual investments in elegy and satire, past and present, and the erotic and political spheres, to reconstruct a tarnished reputation in terms of an idealized and aspirant political subjectivity. These complex generic negotiations work to articulate a cultural ambivalence surrounding the ambitious, Protestant female courtier in the Jacobean court in the early 1620s. This ambivalence is registered as a dual narrative of potential agency and political exclusion for the feminine subject that complicates the utopian visions of Spenserian pre-eminence concluding Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. The shorter sequence Lindamira’s Complaint, obscured within the prose text, acts as a cautionary gloss upon such constructions: it inscribes both the potential and the limitations of feminine political agency through typically Sidneian and Spenserian means of textual self-inscription. Overshadowed by the longer sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Lindamira’s Complaint has attracted limited critical attention. The criticism that does exist largely focuses upon the complaint’s autobiographical elements: the name ‘Lindamira’ has been interpreted as an approximate anagram of Ladi Mari; the story of Lindamira’s parents closely corresponds to the marriage of Wroth’s parents, Robert Sidney and Barbara Gamage; and Lindamira’s experience of a loss of favour in the court and an unhappy marriage in retirement in the country bears a close resemblance to Wroth’s experience.57 Further, the subject of the

110

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

complaint laments the loss of a beloved, the recipient of ‘fourteen years unchang’d affection’, who abandons her for ‘new loves’ (502); a narrative linked to the affair of William Herbert and Wroth through the existence of Wroth’s two illegitimate children to William Herbert after the death of her husband.58 It is a narrative of secret lost love repeated in other shadowings of Wroth’s experience through the stories of Pamphilia and Bellamira. Lindamira’s story is translated into verse by Pamphilia ‘because I lik’d it, or rather found her estate so neere agree with mine’, and this autobiographical frame is completed by its audience, Dorolina, describing the narrative as ‘some thing more exactly related than a fixion’ (502, 505). This insistent autobiographical encoding would have been difficult for a coterie reader to ignore, and the text’s investment in autobiographical discourse refigures both its political and generic status. The complaint typically laments the loss of the lover, but here the text uses this loss as a site for the speaker’s self-construction in terms of a constancy repeatedly coupled with ‘worth’. This punning upon Wroth’s name shifts the complaint from a generalized lament to a public defence of the sequence’s author, doubly ventriloquized through the voices of Pamphilia and Lindamira. Such ventriloquizing disrupts any simple connection between authorial and textual subject, creating, as Danielle Clarke argues, a doubleness of articulation that inscribes an authorial anxiety towards self-revelation.59 While these strategies of indirection are constantly deployed in the Urania’s other shadowings of the figure of Wroth, in Lindamira’s Complaint they are countered by the specificity of its autobiographical encodings to produce a narrative that invites the coterie reader, like Dorolina, to find there ‘some thing more exactly related than a fixion’. As Mary Ellen Lamb convincingly argues, topical allusions and identifications ‘are not just part of the apparatus of Wroth’s text; they lie at the core of its narrative act’ and cannot simply be ignored because of past critical infelicities.60 Here authorial self-construction is itself related as a fictional narrative, positioning ‘Wroth’ in effect as both inside and outside the text. In the local context of a coterie reading audience, the sequence’s repeated references to ‘worth’ act as a thinly disguised signature, operating, in Derridean terms, as the unstable and contingent trace of the exterior of the text within its interior.61 The text’s disguised and defensive self-construction is first invoked through the private context of the erotic sphere. In the opening sonnet, the lover might try ‘new loves’ but is warned that he enters an economy of fickle favour where he too might be abandoned; ‘And be assur’d they likewise will choose more’, in contrast to the speaker’s

The Politics of Withdrawal 111

constant ‘twise seaven yeares love’ (502). The sequence moves to use this private frame as a commentary upon a broader sphere of cultural activity, describing her loss as part of ‘world like change’ where worth is replaced by beauty: Conscience is lost, and outward fairenes gaines The place where worth did, or else seemd to move, Thus world like change new triall still brings forth. (503) The sequence sets up constant negotiations between the private and the public, placing desires for death, lost memories and an abandonment to ‘weeping afternoones’ against damaging critiques of her lover’s ‘errors’ and faults: ‘Thy selfe a Bubble each faire face can blowe’ (504). The autobiographical identification of Lindamira and Wroth connects this lover with William Herbert, and the constant stress in the sequence upon his inconstancy and unreliability corresponds with contemporary political critiques of his character. Archbishop Abbot observed in 1617 that he ‘looketh only to his owne ends and whatsoever leagues, promises and confederations are made within one hour they come to nothing’.62 Although the sequence ostensibly pursues reconciliation with the lover, the force of its attacks upon him and the clarity of his identification indicates that the sequence is directed towards his public discredit as well as towards the related project of the speaker’s self-defence. The final sonnet of the sequence reinforces this positioning of their relationship in the public eye, and amplifies the speaker’s self-defence against her lover’s superficiality: Some doe, perhaps, both wrong my love, and care, Taxing me with mistrust, and Jelousie, From both which sinnes in love like freedome, free I live, these slanders but new raised are. What though from griefe, my soule I doe not spare, When I perceive neglect’s slight face on me? While unto some the loving smiles I see, I am not Jealous, they so well doe fare. But doubt my selfe lest I lesse worthy am. Or that it was but flashes, no true flame, Dazl’d my eyes, and so my humour fed.

112

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

If this be jealousie, then doe I yeeld, And doe confesse I thus goe arm’d to field, For by such Jealousie my love is led. (504–505) The strong elements of public self-defence and attack in these sonnets again problematize Jeffrey Masten’s reading of the sequence as ‘a sustained inscription of emotion’, according to which the sonnets are ‘deployed as a withdrawal into a privatized discursive space – deployed against the making public, the circulation, of a woman’s story’.63 Conversely, the insistent autobiographical frame surrounding the complaint inserts the sequence into the public sphere for the Jacobean coterie reader, and Wroth’s deployment of the genre is one that couples the generic speaking position of betrayed female plainant with a strong element of personal and political self-interest, arming her for battle in the field of Jacobean court culture. In this deployment of complaint as a means of idealized self-construction against the dual betrayals of the lover and an altered world where her worth is undervalued, Wroth capitalizes upon and transforms a set of complexities pre-existent within the genre. The vulnerability of the form in the early modern period to a` clef readings provides a lyric equivalent to the elements of roman a` clef employed in the prose narrative, and a reinforcement of the autobiographical frame constructed immediately around the sequence. The substitution of the conventionally male narratorial frame with the female voice of Pamphilia and the identification of the text as her feminine transpositions of Lindamira’s plaint into verse disrupt the gender hierarchies inherent in male-authored female plaint. This means that the objectification of the female narrating subject under the gaze of the male narratorial ‘I’ is transformed into a relationship of equivalence between narrator and speaker: ‘her estate so neere agree with mine’. Lindamira’s story echoes and amplifies the larger narrative of Pamphilia’s relationship with Amphilanthus, harnessing the interpretative instabilities generated by the tension between male narrator and female plainant in maleauthored female complaint to expand a particularized lament to a more general complaint against the behaviour of inconstant men. This blurring of the plainant Lindamira’s narrative with that of Pamphilia and Wroth also works to rewrite, in terms of an associated virtue, Wroth’s personal history of a relationship with Herbert outside marriage, which was made visible to courtly comment through the presence of her illegitimate children.64 As I have argued previously through John Kerrigan’s analysis, the complaint has two modes, elegaic and satiric: the first lamenting

The Politics of Withdrawal 113

a past betrayal where loss is unrecoverable, and the second pursuing the redress of a recoverable wrong in the present.65 Lindamira’s complaint negotiates between both traditions of complaint, repositioning the feminine lament of loss as a means of remaking the authorial self shadowed behind Lindamira’s voice in the present. In its association of the betrayal of the lover with the ‘world-like change’ of contemporary courtly practice, the sequence also draws upon a final aspect of the genre: its use as a complaint against the times, when virtues are out of use. Again, however, this is couched not in terms of irrecoverable loss, but as an active bid to reinstate Wroth in terms of her virtue as a representative of ‘worth’ in a contemporary courtly milieu. The sequence’s orientation towards courtly criticism is also signalled in its textual frame, a prose narrative that directly addresses a history of court practice surrounding the figure of Lindamira. This functions as a concurrent complaint directed not towards the cruel lover, but towards the queen who occasioned her disenfranchisement from favour. The prose complaint again constructs Lindamira in idealizing terms, as ‘a lady of great spirit, excellent qualities, and beautifull enough to make many in love with her’ (499). These same terms of exemplarity characterize Lindamira in the lyric complaint. The prose narrative describes a sudden and bewildering withdrawal of royal favour ‘as if never had: Lindamira remaining like one in a gay Masque, the night pass’d, they are in their old clothes againe, and no appearance of what was’ (500). This withdrawal remains inexplicable to Lindamira, until her lover reveals it to be motivated by the queen’s own subjection to love for him: ‘a jealous woman whose doubt of losse brought her losing and Lindamira’s gain’ (501). The juxtaposition of the narratives of loss of royal favour and erotic loss, linked by the consistent characterization of the plainant Lindamira in terms of constant love, creates a curious economy of equivalence between the prose and poetic complaints. The public discredit attached to William Herbert’s character in the sonnet sequence reflects back upon the capricious actions of the queen, as does the sequence’s reference to the shift in the times that makes the speaker of little value in the court. This equivalence enlarges Lindamira’s lyric criticisms of contemporary courtly change to a broader shift in court culture taking place over several years and displaced in the prose narrative to an earlier feminine frame. The correspondence of the two narratives also constructs the speaker as, interchangeably, erotic and political subject: the political disempowerment experienced by Lindamira in the court of the queen is implicitly redressed by the textual empowerment in the self-defence

114

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

and attack effected in the erotic sphere of the lyric. The equivalence in political and erotic subjectivity suggested in this exchange is foregrounded in the prose frame, deployed to equalize the political status of queen and subject in the court of love: yet love she knew had commanded her, who borne a Princesse, and match’d to a King, yet could not resist his power, might with greater ease soveraignize over a subject: but in Loves Court all are fellowsubjects; and thus her Majesty was deceived in her greatnesse, which could not, as she thought, be subject: and therefore, though others must be Vassals when they are all companions and serve alike.66 (500) In these doubled economies of complaint, the sonnet sequence’s a` clef properties and its investment in self-defence make explicit the political implications of an erotic subjection. In the prose narrative, both the queen and Lindamira are disempowered as political subjects by their subjection to love, and the narrative functions as a plaint situated in the past, expanding on woes rather than redress. However, the linking of the prose narrative with Lindamira’s more contemporary complaint against her lover and the times, shadowing a strategy of authorial reconstruction in a particular, later Jacobean courtly context, means that Lindamira as open to her strategies of redress denied to the queen, who remains lover but not poet. Thus, the inequalities in status and power outlined in the first prose complaint are redistributed in the second lyric complaint. In this move, the situations of subject and sovereign are reversed. The queen is left as a figure in a masque, frozen in a past fictional frame, while Lindamira as poet uses the erotic subjectivity available in lyric complaint to import her past betrayal to the strategies of an active present. By 1621, the year of the Urania’s publication, there was some evidence of Wroth’s success in the pursuit of courtly influence. As Barbara Lewalski notes, Wroth participated as a member of the official procession at Anne’s state funeral, was granted a warrant by James to provide her with deer from the king’s forest in 1621, and had been successful in several petitions to the court to relieve her financial distress and gain protection from her creditors. Further, having sent the Duke of Buckingham a copy of the Urania, she was able to seek his protection as the favourite of the king against ‘the strang constructions’ made of the book.67 In this context, the reactivation of a narrative of courtly exclusion at the hands of a jealous queen in Lindamira’s prose complaint provides a platform for Wroth to present a thinly disguised and self-justifying version of the

The Politics of Withdrawal 115

history of her courtly exclusion.68 It is published two years after the Anne of Denmark’s death, and allows Wroth’s textual voice to position the queen in the past, with no possibility of redress. It presents Lindamira as a courtier of exemplary fidelity and service, blameless victim of a jealous queen. This recruits to Wroth’s virtuous self-construction the rhetoric of feminine jealousy familiar in contemporary debates about women and in two previous examples of complaint circulated under feminine signatures: the casket sonnets and the Pandora sonnets. Mary Ellen Lamb notes a similar dynamic at work in the dedications of Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, where in an imagined scene ‘fair Virtue’ acts as a poor presenter of the book to Queen Anne, only to remain unrecognized and undervalued by a queen implicitly jealous of the fact that ‘All Princes of the world doe most desire’ the presenter, rather than herself.69 There is an element of political self-interest activated in Wroth’s text here that is typical of complaint as a genre. Yet while the sequence positions the speaker in opposition to her rival in the court of love, it also activates a set of oppositional discourses that extend beyond erotic competition to a set of broader political differences that may be recruited to the text’s rhetoric of ideal courtiership. During her lifetime Anne was strongly pro-Spanish, a supporter of the hispanophile faction in the Jacobean court, and was associated with an attendant Catholicism. The reference to Lindamira as ‘one in a gay masque’ in the prose narrative recalls Anne’s use of masques presented at her court to intervene in diplomatic politics, displaying her support of Spanish Catholic interests by repeatedly inviting the Spanish ambassador and excluding the French.70 Contrary to Wroth’s courtierly ambitions, the masque reference may also have recalled to a contemporary Jacobean audience the culturally disturbing constructions of feminine power informing the Masque of Blackness, which included Wroth as a participant. Implicit, however, in Wroth’s self-constructions through Lindamira as a courtier of ‘worth’ are her alignments with the Protestant faction operating in opposition to the hispanophile group associated with Anne. During the years leading to the publication of the Urania, Wroth was active in the Sidney and Herbert circles that formed a locus of support for Protestant politics. Her friendship and correspondence with Sir Dudley Carleton, ambassador in the Hague, gave her access to the latest developments concerning the political crisis in Bohemia, which galvanized Protestant militancy in England in support of the Princess Elizabeth and the Continental Protestant cause.71 She acted as a conduit for this news in Sidney and Herbert circles: Anne Clifford’s diaries record Wroth’s presence at Penshurst in August 1618 with Lady

116

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

Dorothy Sidney and Lady Manners, in which Wroth related ‘a great deal of news from beyond the sea’.72 Wroth’s identification not only with Protestant circles but also with the more marginal and oppositional body of Spenserian writers aligns the personal political interest of the complaints with a broader complaint against the ‘world-like change’ that has led to the undervaluing of the Protestant political courtier. The text’s curious revival of a decade-old complaint against Anne allows not only Wroth’s personal reinvention, but implicitly positions that reinvention in opposition to Anne’s court practices and her political alignments. In recruiting a narrative of erotic betrayal to a complaint against courtly practice, Wroth again draws upon a set of Sidneian and Spenserian precedents within the genre. This strategy pursues the institution of Protestant political and religious values from a position of courtly disaffection. As the complaint is a genre used by both Spenser and Mary Sidney, Wroth’s specific identification of her generic investments in the title of Lindamira’s Complaint positions her text in a line of Elizabethan Sidneian precedent. Spenser’s Complaints opens with The Ruines of Time, a lyric complaint mourning the death of Sir Philip Sidney as Christ-like martyr and seeking to preserve his memory through verse. In its closing envoy, the complaint positions him as ‘heauens ornament’ and his sister, Mary Sidney, as the representative of such divine privilege on earth: So vnto heauen let your high minde aspire, And loath this drosse of sinfull worlds desire.73 Enabling both a complaint against the times and an idealized textual promotion of both the poet and his Sidneian patrons, the genre is also adopted by Mary Sidney in her psalm translations. Spenser’s strategy of the personification of the genius of the city Verulamium as female plainant in The Ruines of Time is also deployed in Sidneian psalms in ‘The Lamentations of Jeremiah, Chapter I’ through the feminized voice of Jerusalem, left desolate and afflicted for her transgressions.74 Surrounded by enemies and betrayed by deceiving lovers, the speaker in this complaint laments her loss in the same terms as Wroth’s Lindamira, concluding by shifting its elegaic mode to an expression of vengeful desire against her enemies: ‘Let all their wickednes come before thee: and doe vnto them, as thou hast done vnto me for all my transgressions’ (226). The tears of Jerusalem – ‘mine eye, mine eye runneth downe with water, because the comforter that should relieve my soule is farre from

The Politics of Withdrawal 117

me’ (226) – recall the ‘silver dropping teares’ (261) attributed by Spenser to Mary Sidney at the loss of her brother. In both texts, the amplified grief of the plainant directed towards the desolation of the times is recruited to a contemporary bid for redress, whether in terms of poetic recognition and patronage or revenge upon personal enemies. Although in Wroth’s complaint the register of loss, betrayal and redress is displaced to the field of personal politics and feminized rivalry, her position as inheritrix to a textual Sidneian and Spenserian tradition of politicized complaint lends her complaint against the times and bid for personal reinstatement of the legacy of a Sidneian desire for a divinely inspired courtly centrality, the embodiment, in Spenser’s terms, of ‘all bountie and all vertuous love’. This covert history resists the Spenserian position of virtuous retirement attributed to other female Protestant courtiers by poets such as Samuel Daniel and William Browne, while simultaneously capitalizing on that positioning as one from which the feminine voice might speak. Through her choice and deployment of genre, Wroth constructs herself as a new Protestant voice in the Jacobean court, fulfilling Chapman’s identification of her as a new star ‘discouered in our Sydneian Asterisme’.75 Yet the success of these generic negotiations as political strategies remains questionable; they have an obscurity that may have limited their political efficacy. In this way, the displacing of these Sidneian aspects of Wroth’s complaint onto embedded histories of Jacobean political opposition and Elizabethan Sidneian textuality registers not only aspirant political ambition for a female Protestant courtier, but its ambivalent status in the Jacobean court of the 1620s. The complaints require a particular coterie reader to recognize their biographical encodings, all situated in the personal histories of courtiers and part of an increasingly distant past. This invests the text’s revisionist defence of its author with a destabilizing indirection of reference. On one hand, then, the sequence demonstrates the agency that generic negotiation allows to the early modern woman writer, as Wroth exploits the fluidity of the genre of complaint to write an erotic lament and a complaint against the times, keyed to a particularized project of authorial self-construction in both personal and Protestant terms. But, on the other hand, the embedded complexity of its generic negotiations also demonstrates the difficulty of such a positioning, and there is a sense that the aspirant female Protestant courtier constructed in this complaint articulates both Elizabethan and Sidneian confidence of ‘worth’, and a contemporary anxiety towards such a positioning for the feminine Sidneian subject in a new Jacobean context. It is through genre that this tension becomes

118

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

visible: as in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, the text’s reactivation of the unfashionable sonnet sequence is keyed to the related Spenserian concepts of Elizabethan nostalgia and contemporary displacement, a nostalgia working counterproductively to the pressing contemporary self-interest that underwrites one mode of the genre of complaint. In these sequences, Wroth revisits some of the lyric possibilities opened up for the early modern woman poet in the productive generic combination of sonnet and complaint, most fully exploited 50 years earlier in the example of the casket sonnets. However, her Jacobean textual practice is keyed to the past in such complex ways that the lyric possibilities opened up by these genres become curiously obscured. Their use here has an ambivalence: in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, the generic combination of sonnet and complaint generate a set of possibilities for a female lyric subject deployed to effective political ends; in Lindamira’s Complaint, the same combination, used in a political project of a different kind, produces a sense that the moment of their generic efficacy for women writers might have passed. In a sense, this is a reflection of the untimely deployment of the genres by Wroth in 1621 and of the history of the genres themselves. Each of the genres of Petrarchan sonnet and complaint carries with it a weight of literary history by 1621, which informs the text’s generic negotiations in both productive and problematic ways. In particular, that literary history includes the history of sonnet sequences and complaints circulated under feminine signatures, which has been traced in this book. This means that the use of those genres in the Urania bring with them an Elizabethan history of scandal, disenfranchisement and lyric exclusion for women writers, as well as a potential site for feminine lyric agency. Wroth’s entry into these genres is thus neither independent nor anomalous, but part of a broader history of female writing and female authorship informed by the textual practice of both men and women.

Conclusion

In 1998, Josephine Roberts surveyed a set of examples of prosopopoeia in early modern England, texts written by men but circulated under feminine signatures, and argued that they served both as an emphatic warning against making simplistic attributions to historical women writers and as valuable sources for understanding ‘the emergent role of the early woman writer’.1 This study enlarges upon both these suggestions through the examination of a single genre, the sonnet sequence, in order to illuminate the ways in which texts of uncertain attribution contributed to the construction of early modern women’s secular writing in England. Not only did these texts alter the shape and availability of the genre for women writers, changing a scene of relative lyric agency and possibility existing in the 1560s and early 1570s to one of absence at the male-authored genre’s height in the later Elizabethan period, they also impacted on the wider field of early modern women’s writing in England, in part producing a bias towards the devotional compared to other European writing traditions. Despite the period of hiatus examined in this literary history, this set of texts shows some of the ways in which specific generic traditions operated for early modern women writers, providing precedents that might hinder as much as enable the assumption of certain subject positions or generic examples. They also display, however, a high level of innovation and ingenuity, particularly in generic combination of the sonnet with meditation and complaint, in order to negotiate some of the problems attendant upon female authorship, imagined or real, operating at particular points and in specific configurations within this literary history. The story of women writers and the English sonnet sequence provides a diverse set of examples of the ways in which the early modern woman writer was conceived and constructed, by both her male and her female 119

120

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

contemporaries. Rather than being confined to religious topoi and forms or articulating feminine limitation within secular forms, these texts demonstrate a surprising level of political engagement, corresponding to the specific differences of the position of the texts in history and in a genre particularly sensitive to the production and reproduction of shifting ideological pressures in the Elizabethan and the Jacobean courts. The sequences might be read as admonitory instruction to the sovereign, whether in terms of the direction of public policy or a criticism of the court, as religious propaganda, or as bids for personal political advancement. The indirection of relationships between author, signature and textual subjectivity that haunts all of these texts, coupled with an unstable assignation of genre across these categories, means that this history works as a caveat against too strict a demarcation between male-authored and female-authored genres and their interests. Women’s writing cannot, for example, be considered as a special category excluded from recent readings of the public and political aspects of the genre. If the attachment of a female signature to a text makes a difference, these differences are not always the consistent expression of a generalized ‘femininity’; and if the access of women writers to particular discursive spheres in the Renaissance is different from that of men, this does not signal their exclusion from those discourses, but registers the need to decode the terms of that engagement. The insertion of the woman writer into the genre of the sonnet sequence is a complex process of negotiation, where agency shifts according to the status of the author, the way the text is circulated, the investments of its audience and the extent of its political engagement. Gender here becomes an unpredictable category articulated in practice and shifting according to specific historical circumstances. This model of gender borrows from Judith Butler’s construction of gender as performance, the repeated stylization of the body, and counters an essentialist location of the gender of the text in the body of its author. This freeing of the gender of the text from the gender of its author has important ramifications for the attribution debates that have surrounded almost all of these sequences. The emphasis upon finding a ‘real’ historical woman writer to authenticate the text and find it deserving of gynocritical attention has produced a set of strained and at times doubtful attributions which confer an uneasy status upon the texts and leave them at the margins of literary history. While attention to attribution debates resists the assumption that early modern women writers were non-existent, silenced or confined, and remain current for that purpose, the wresting of a construction of gender from the body of

Conclusion

121

the author to the paratextual signals surrounding a text’s production and circulation removes the distorting pressure of gynocritical projects of retrieval. It allows a sequence such as the casket sonnets attributed to Mary Stuart, an important political text of the period, to be reconsidered outside its complex attribution debate, illuminating a moment of feminine lyric agency operating in England in the early 1570s, which is almost immediately foreclosed. The existence of a body of sequences circulated, to different degrees, as women’s writing also means that a wider range of feminine poetic models were available to women writers than formerly supposed. The critical commonplace that the history of the love lyric provided only male models to women is problematized by this set of sequences, and this history demonstrates that access to poetic models is again a shifting category, determined by the writer’s particular position in history. A writer such as Mary Wroth at the close of the genre had a set of precedents to draw upon, which were not available, in the English tradition at least, to an earlier writer such as Anne Lock. But the history of sonnet sequences circulated under female signatures provides both positive and negative precedents for women writing later in the genre. The wide circulation of the indecorous casket sonnets of Mary Stuart, their success as Protestant propaganda, conversely made the genre of the sonnet sequence during its height in the last two decades of the sixteenth century unavailable to a generation of women sonneteers. Their exclusion from the genre between 1571 and Wroth’s Jacobean sequence was not predicated upon an inability to negotiate the gendered dynamics of the genre, as has been assumed, but arose from the specific circulation history of one widely read sequence. If Elizabeth’s circulation of Mary Stuart’s sequence prevented women’s entry into the genre in the Elizabethan court, it was conversely the interest of her son in the sonnet and the Scottish sonneteers of the Jacobean court that provided a context for Mary Wroth’s continuation of the genre as late as 1621. And Wroth might have found in the example of Mary Stuart’s sonnets, addressed to an adulterous lover, the model for Pamphilia’s expressions of constancy to her unmarried lover Amphilanthus; a model stripped of its original political potency and ripe for regeneration in a new Protestant context. Although a discussion of the genre of the male-authored sonnet sequence is outside the scope of this project, this group of sequences provides some new perspectives on the wider history of the sonnet as a genre. These sequences extend the limits of the genre in both directions: Anne Lock’s Meditation linking the Elizabethan genre to the Henrician

122

Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621

court and a Protestant Continental tradition, and Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and Lindamira’s Complaint repositioning a set of Elizabethan precedents in a Jacobean context. The circulation of Mary Stuart’s sequence from 1571 also broadens the history of the genre from the 1580s and 1590s, and points again to the influence of French and Scottish traditions in the development of the genre in England. The sequences as a group provide a fragmented but illuminating history of negotiation, limitation and agency across a range of discursive spheres. They indicate above all that both gender and genre are contingent categories, simultaneously contained by the past and rewritten at each moment of their articulation and interpretation.

Notes

Introduction 1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945), 36. 2. See Margaret Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 39–65. 3. A[nne] L[ock], Sermons of John Caluin, vpon the Songe that Ezechias Made after He had bene Sicke, and Afflicted by the Hand of God, Conteyned in the 38. Chapiter of Esay (London, 1560); George Buchanan, Ane Detectiovn of the duinges of Marie Quene of Scottes (London, 1571). 4. John Soowthern, Pandora, the Musyque of the Beautie, of His Mistresse Diana (London, 1584); Lady Mary Wroth, The Countess of Mountgomeries Urania (London, 1621). 5. See Michael R.G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 6. Rinaldina Russell, ed., Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), xix; Laura Anna Stortoni, ed., Women Poets of the Italian Renaissance: Courtly Ladies and Courtesans, trans. Laura Anna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie (New York: Italica Press, 1997), xxvi–xxvii. 7. Vittoria Colonna, Rime de la Divina Vittoria Colonna Marchesa di Pescara, nuovamente stampate (Parma, 1538); Rime della diva Vittoria Colonna da Pescara (Venice, 1544); Girolamo Ruscelli, Tutte le Rime della Illustriss. Et Eccellentiss. Signora Vittoria Colonna. Marchesana di Pescara (Venice, 1558); Ludovico Dolce, Rime della S. Vittoria Colonna, Marchesana Illust. Di Pescara (Vinegia, 1559). See Joseph Gibaldi, ‘Vittoria Colonna: Child, Woman, Poet’, in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 22–46; Margaret L. King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 142–143. 8. Veronica Gambara, Le Rime, ed. Alan Bullock (Firenze: Olschki, 1995). The first printed collection of Gambara’s poetry appeared in 1553 in Girolamo Ruscelli, Rime di Diversi eccelenti Autori Brescianti Nuovamente Racolte, et Mandate in luce da Girolamo Ruscelli (Venice, 1553). 9. Gaspara Stampa, Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Laura Anna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie (New York: Italica Press, 1994). See Frank J. Warnke, ‘Aphrodite’s Priestess, Love’s Martyr’, in Women Writers, ed. Wilson, 3–21; Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Feminine Pastoral as Heroic Martyrdom: Gaspara Stampa and Mary Wroth’, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 118–154; Mary B. Moore, Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 58–93; Gordon Braden, ‘Gaspara Stampa and the Gender of Petrarchism’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38:2 (1996), 115–139. 123

124

Notes

10. See Giovanna Rabitti, ‘Lyric Poetry, 1500–1650’, trans. Abigail Brundin, in A History of Women’s Writing in Italy, ed. Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 37–51, and ‘Vittoria Colonna as Role Model for Cinquecento Women Poets’, in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), 478–497; Diana Robin, ‘Courtesans, Celebrity, and Print Culture in Renaissance Venice: Tullia d’Aragona, Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco’, in Italian Women and the City: Essays, ed. Janet Levarie Smarr and Daria Valentini (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 35–59; Stortoni and Lillie, Women Poets, 77–127, 221–249. 11. Poems were dedicated to Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara by Lucia Bertani Dell’Oro; Veronica Gambara and Marguerite de Valois dedicated poems to Vittoria Colonna. Stortoni and Lillie, Women Poets, xvii. 12. Stortoni and Lillie, Women Poets, ix–xiv. 13. However, the example of Elisabetta Gonzaga at the court of Urbino, upon which Castiglione based The Book of the Courtier, indicates a cultural anxiety surrounding women’s new participation in literary culture: their engagement is characterized by their passive reception of male courtier’s verse rather than the agency practised by women such as Gambara and Colonna. See the definition of the male courtier as writer: ‘He should be very well acquainted with the poets, and no less with the orators and historians, and also skilled at writing both verse and prose, especially in our own language; for in addition to the satisfaction this will give him personally, it will enable him to provide constant entertainment for the ladies, who are usually very fond of such things.’ Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1967), 90. 14. Louise Labe´, Euvres de Louize Labe´ lionnize (Lyon, 1555); Jeanne Prine, ‘Poet of Lyon: Louise Labe´’, in Women Writers, ed. Wilson, 132–148. 15. Frank J. Warnke, trans., Three Women Poets: Renaissance and Baroque (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1987), 25. 16. Franc¸oise Charpentier, ed., Louise Labe´, Oeuvres poe´tiques, et Pernette du Guillet, Rymes (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). The lyric experiments in Du Guillet’s Rymes do not include sonnets. 17. It is also worth noting that in seventeenth-century Mexico, the lyrics of Sor Juana Ine´s de la Cruz included 67 Petrarchan sonnets as well as indigenous Spanish forms. For a Spanish context in which study of early modern women’s contribution to vernacular poetry is only beginning, see Joan F. Cammarata, ed., Women in the Discourse of Early Modern Spain (Gainesville, FL: Florida University Press, 2003); Marta V. Vicente and Luis R. Corteguera, eds, Women, Texts and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); and Magdalena Sa´nchez and Alain Saint-Sae¨ns, eds, Spanish Women in the Golden Age: Images and Realities (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996). 18. Gary Waller, English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century, 2nd Edition (London and New York: Longman, 1993), 239, and ‘Struggling into Discourse: The Emergence of Renaissance Women’s Writing’, in Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret Patterson Hannay (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1985), 238–256.

Notes 125 19. John Freccero, ‘The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics’, Diacritics 5 (1975): 34–40. 20. Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Assimilation with a Difference: Renaissance Women Poets and Literary Influence’, Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 135. 21. Gary Waller, The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of Gender (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 196. 22. See Arthur Marotti, ‘ ‘‘Love is not love’’: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order’, ELH 49 (1982): 396–428; and Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form’, ELH 50 (1983): 415–459. Even Barbara Lewalski, in a text which seeks to ‘move beyond deterministic formulas of containment and control’ in analyzing Jacobean women’s writing, argues that in ‘claiming the Petrarchan love sequence for the female lover-poet, Wroth did not use it as male courtiers often did, for overt political purposes’. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), 263, 315. 23. Heather DuBrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 23. 24. Ibid., 44. 25. Barbara Estrin, Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne and Marvell (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994), 9, 14. 26. For examples of this approach, see the essays in Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke, eds, ‘This Double Voice’: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). 27. See Danielle Clarke, The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing (Harlow: Longman, 2001); Mary B. Moore, Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000); and Kim Walker, Women Writers of the English Renaissance (New York: Twayne, 1996). 28. For the origins of this theory, see Margaret Patterson Hannay, ed., Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works (Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985); Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing, 1649–1688 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988); Tina Krontiris, Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); and Lewalski, Writing Women. 29. For a detailed discussion of the male-authored Renaissance tradition of the Song of Songs, see Noam Flinker, The Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature: Kisses of Their Mouths (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000). 30. Josephine Roberts, ‘The Phallacies of Authorship: Reconstructing the Texts of Early Modern Women Writers’, in Attending to Early Modern Women, ed. Susan D. Amussen and Adele Seef (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 49. 31. For a related reconsideration of current critical orthodoxies surrounding early modern gender and silence, especially those uncritically coupling speech and agency, see Christina Luckyj, ‘A moving Rhetorike’: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). However, as Jennifer Summit points out, writing and speech are distinct modes of articulation; this study investigates textual absence rather

126

32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

1

Notes than silence. Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 8. See Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Harold Love, Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Recent exceptions include Jonathon Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Summit, Lost Property. Rosalie Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 8–9: ‘confusion underlay all Renaissance genre-theory, even the simplest’. Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. Van den Abeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 70. See Estrin, Laura, for a more extensive analysis of Lyotard’s theories of genre in a Renaissance context. Joan Kelly, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 19–50. For related texts in this new field of attribution studies, see Robert Griffin, ed., The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Elizabeth Heale, Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

‘In a mirrour clere’: Anne Lock’s Miserere mei Deus as admonitory Protestantism

1. Elaine Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 61–63; Margaret P. Hannay, ‘ ‘‘Strengthening the walles of . . . Ierusalem’’: Anne Vaughan Lock’s Dedication to the Countess of Warwick’, ANQ 5 (1992): 71–75, and ‘ ‘‘Unlock my lippes’’: The Miserere mei Deus of Anne Vaughan Lock and Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke’, in Privileging Gender in Early Modern England, ed. Jean R. Brink (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1993), 18–36; Susanne Woods, ‘The Body Penitent: A 1560 Calvinist Sonnet Sequence’, ANQ 5 (1992): 137–140. Of these texts, only Margaret Hannay’s 1993 essay considers the attribution problems raised by the disclaimer, but she finds ‘internal evidence’ to link the sonnets and the dedication in a similarity of theme and in Lock’s own parallel of the songs of Hezekiah and David, and makes the attribution in the face of a lack of external evidence to the contrary. Hannay (1993), 21–22. This approach has been followed by almost all other critics in the field. There are two important exceptions. The first is Michael Spiller’s article, ‘A Literary ‘‘first’’: The Sonnet Sequence of Anne Locke (1560)’, Renaissance Studies 11:1 (1997): 41–55, which discusses

Notes 127

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

in detail the attribution to Locke in terms of its generic innovation, possible sources and alternative authors. Although he discusses the sonnets as ‘Locke’s poems’, he leaves open the possibility that they may have been composed by John Knox. The second is Roland Greene’s provocative and serious reading of the sonnets within English devotional tradition, discussed later in this chapter. Roland Greene, ‘Anne Lock’s Meditation: Invention Versus Dilation and the Founding of Puritan Poetics’, in Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ed. Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 153–170. See, for example, Kel Morin Parson’s argument that the prefatory sonnets challenge prescriptions of feminine silence in the period by enacting the struggle of the subject to speak; despair’s oppressive presence is seen to be shadowed by that of patriarchal culture, and the poems become a manifesto for all Protestant subjects’ right to speak, regardless of gender. The unconvincing interchangeability of despair and patriarchy here force the text to conform to the agendas of liberal feminism; it is read primarily in terms of its status as women’s writing. Kel Morin-Parsons, ‘ ‘‘Thus crave I mercy’’: The Preface of Anne Locke’, in Other Voices, Other Views: Expanding the Canon in English Renaissance Studies, ed. Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox and Graham Roebuck (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 280–284. At the other end of the spectrum, John Ottenhof’s article in the same volume gestures towards the text’s place in a devotional lyric tradition, but in trying to ‘validate this work’ through its formal competence and contribution to maleauthored traditions, the article tends to reinforce the negative assumptions surrounding early modern women’s textuality that it tries to contest. John Ottenhof, ‘Mediating Anne Locke’s Meditation Sonnets’, Other Voices, 290–310. See Susan M. Felch, ed., The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock (Tempe, AZ: Renaissance English Text Society, 1999), xvi–xxxvi; and W.C. Richardson, Stephen Vaughan, Financial Agent of Henry VIII (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953). J. Meadows Cowper, ed., Complaynt of Roderyck Mors; and The Lamentacyon of a Christen agaynst the Cytye of London (London: N. Trau ¨ bner and Co., 1874); Patrick Collinson, ‘The Role of Women in the English Reformation Illustrated by the Life and Friendships of Anne Locke’, Studies in Church History 2 (1965): 261–262; Richardson, Stephen Vaughan, 21–22. Patrick Collinson, A Mirror of Elizabethan Puritanism: The Life and Letters of ‘Godly Master Dering’ (London: Dr. William’s Trust, 1964). David Laing, ed., The Works of John Knox, 6 vols (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Society, 1846–64), 4: 219–241, 6: 11–101. See also Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘John Knox and His Relations to Women’, Familiar Studies of Men and Books (London: William Heinemann, 1924), 202–244; and Susan M. Felch, ‘ ‘‘Deir Sister’’: The Letters of John Knox to Anne Vaughan Lok’, Renaissance and Reformation 19:4 (1995): 57–68. Jean Calvin, Sermons on Isaiah’s Prophecy of the Death and Passion of Christ, trans. and ed. T.H.L. Parker (London: Clarke, 1956), 13–16. Calvin’s sermons on Isaiah are to be distinguished from his commentaries on Isaiah, published in French in 1552 and in Latin by Jean Crespin in 1551 and 1559, which the unattributed notes to the 1973 reprint of Lock’s text seem to suggest might

128

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

Notes have been Lock’s source for the sermons, although the wording is ambiguous and it is also suggested that ‘perhaps Mrs Locke heard the sermons herself & purchased a manuscript copy of this section’. Anne Lock, Mrs Lock’s Little Book (London: Olive Tree, 1973), 40. Jean Calvin, Sermons de Jehan Calvin Sur le Cantique que fait le bon Roy Ezechias apres qu’il eut este malade & afflige de la main de Dieu (Geneva, 1562). Interestingly, the inscription identifies the book itself as a gift to Henry Lock from his wife Anne, and as such does not securely identify the translator to be Anne Lock. However, there is much supporting evidence for the attribution: including the text’s circulation under Anne Lock’s initials A.L., its dedication to Catherine Brandon, known to be part of Lock’s circle, and Lock’s place in the Calvinist community of Genevan exiles. Marcy North, The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 215. North, Anonymous Renaissance, 256. J.W. Saunders, The Profession of English Letters (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), 44; Wall, Imprint of Gender, 13. Hyder Rollins, ed., Tottel’s Miscellany, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), 1: 2; Barnabe Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs and Sonnets, ed. Judith M. Kennedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989); Le Roy Merrill, ed., The Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925), 100–102. Roland Greene, ‘Anne Lock’s Meditation’, 165. Catherine Parr, Prayers and Meditations (London, 1545), and The Lamentacion of a Sinner (London, 1547); Lady Elizabeth Fane, The Lady Elizabeth Fane’s 21 Psalms and 102 Proverbs (London, 1550); Elizabeth I, A Godly Meditation of the Soul (London, 1548). Although Elizabeth Fane’s text is now lost, it was described by George Ballard as ‘several psalms and pious meditations, and proverbs, in the English Tongue’. George Ballard, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (London, 1752), 119. However, Margaret Ezell’s work on seventeenth-century women poets issues a caveat against this sort of construction of disclaimers in women’s texts, arguing that they were less motivated by specifically gendered fears of social censure or critical response than by their participation in a rhetoric of modesty shared by writers of both sexes. Margaret J.M. Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 62–100. Wall, Imprint of Gender, 17, 23–31, 50–57. In addition, the presence of a disclaimer in a text as early as Lock’s modifies Wall’s reformulations of the concept, which locate a ‘real’ stigma of print ‘clearly operative at mid-century when Wyatt and Surrey did not think to publish’, as distinct from the rhetorical production and control of the stigma of print in the 1580s and 1590s. Patrick Collinson makes the attribution tentatively, as ‘perhaps Knox’s work’; the notes to Mrs Lock’s Little Book, a reprint of the British Museum text of the sermons, makes the attribution more definitely: ‘No doubt the second item in Mrs Lock’s little book, ‘‘A meditation of a penitent sinner’’, a metrical paraphrase of Psalm 51, was sent to her by Knox at the same time as

Notes 129

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

the first.’ W. Stanford Reid’s biography of Knox, Trumpeter of God, follows Collinson’s more tentative position: ‘During her stay in Geneva, Mrs. Locke translated Calvin’s sermons on the song of Hezekiah which she published along with a poetical meditation on Psalm 51, possibly written by Knox himself.’ Patrick Collinson, ‘The Role of Women’, 265; Anne Lock, Mrs Lock’s Little Book (London: Olive Tree, 1973), 127; W. Stanford Reid, Trumpeter of God: A Biography of John Knox (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), 141. Laing glosses the psalms published in Knox’s texts as ‘although sanctioned by Knox, they cannot be considered as forming any part of the Reformer’s works’. David Laing, ed., The Works of John Knox, 6 vols (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Society, 1846–64), 6: 284–285. Roland Greene, ‘Anne Lock’s Meditation’, 156. Laing’s record, using the manuscripts of David Calderwood’s History of the Kirk of Scotland as a source, prints a consistent stream of letters from Knox to Lock during 1559, dated 6 April, 3 May, 23 June, 2 September, 15 October and 18 November; none support the suggestion that Knox supplied Lock with two sonnet sequences to end her translation of Calvin’s sermons. Laing, Works, 6: 11–101. Jean Taffin, Des Marques des Enfans de Dieu (Harlem, 1588). Taffin, Des Marques (1588), A2r, 159. Taffin, Des Marques (1597), 1v. Jean Taffin, De Merck-teeckenen der kinderen Godt, trans. Iacobvs Viverivs (Rotterdam, 1613), 54r–58r. Anne Prowse, trans., Of the Markes of the Children of God (London, 1590). The second and third impressions were published in London in 1609 and 1615. The French edition is a re-issue of Taffin’s fourth edition (Saumur, 1601). For an analysis of ‘The necessitie and benefite of affliction’ in its textual and cultural context, see Micheline White, ‘Renaissance Englishwomen and Religious Translations: The Case of Anne Lock’s Of the Markes of the Children of God (1590)’, ELR 29 (1999): 393–395. Cambridge, MS Ii.5.37., fol. 5r. See Jane Stevenson, ‘Women, Writing and Scribal Publication in the Sixteenth Century’, English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 9 (2000): 1–32, who argues that the manuscript was compiled in support of Bartholo Silva, rather than Edward Dering, and was intended for the readership of Leicester and ultimately Queen Elizabeth (18–19). Susan M. Felch, ‘ ‘‘Noble Gentlewomen Famous for their Learning’’: The London Circle of Anne Vaughan Lock’, ANQ 16:2 (2003): 14–19. Susan Felch presents a similar argument, supplemented by her identification of consistent ‘unusual lexical choices’, in the use of participle forms across the text as a whole, see Felch, Collected Works, liii–liv. Isaiah 38: 3. Danielle Clarke suggestively extends this argument to the anxieties surrounding the body of an unmarried queen, suggesting that Hezekiah’s example would be best followed by Elizabeth through the practice of godly government rather than ‘satisfying popular and political demands that she marry as soon as possible’. Clarke, Politics, 151. Rivkah Zim, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer 1535–1601 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 82–104. John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 211.

130

Notes

34. The manuscript of the translation bears in a second hand, under the initials E.R., either ‘scr’, scriptus, or ‘sec’, secundus, referring to the text’s composition in the second year of Elizabeth’s reign; but whatever reading is made, the hand in which the poem was copied into the manuscript indicates that it was composed early in Elizabeth’s reign. Ruth Hughey, ed., The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1960), 456–457. 35. Michael Spiller also notes the connections between Wyatt and Lock, but suggests that if she was unaware of Tottel’s Miscellany, she might have been influenced by Surrey’s prefatory sonnet in Wyatt’s Psalmes. Spiller, ‘A literary ‘‘first’’ ’, 49. 36. Pernette Du Guillet’s Rymes of 1546 contains no sonnets, although it provides a precedent for the publication of women’s lyric poetry; the first edition of the Oeuvres of Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches, which does contain sonnets, appeared in 1578. 37. For a discussion of Marot’s formal innovation, see Michel Jeanneret, Poe´sie et Tradition Biblique au XVIe Sie`cle (Paris: J. Corti, 1969). 38. Henri-Le´onard Bordier, Le Chansonnier Huguenot du XVIe Sie`cle (Paris: Libraire Tross, 1870), 367. 39. Terence Cave, Devotional Poetry in France, c. 1570–1613 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 97–99, 135–145. 40. For a full and clear critique of definitions of a feminine text, see Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Sexual Signatures: Feminism After the Death of the Author’, Space, Time and Perversion: The Politics of Bodies (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 9–24. 41. See Summit, Lost Property, 8–10. 42. Ibid.; and North, Anonymous Renaissance, 254–256. 43. Thomas Deloney, ‘The Dutches of Suffolkes Calamitie’, in The Works of Thomas Deloney, ed. Francis Oscar Mann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 393; Thomas Drue, The Life of the Dutches of Suffolke (London, 1631). 44. John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. Josiah Pratt, 8 vols (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1877), 8: 569. 45. For a discussion of the practice and parameters of such counsel, see A.N. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth 1558–1585 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 46–74. 46. John Calvin, Letters of John Calvin Selected from the Bonnet Edition (Edinburgh and Carlisle, Pa.: Banner of Truth Trust, 1980), 207–208. 47. Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I (London and New York: Edward Arnold, 1993), 49–51; Norman L. Jones, Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion, 1559 (London and New Jersey: Royal Historical Society, 1982), 9; Winthrop S. Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1980), 90–99, 131–137. 48. Patrick Collinson, ‘Windows in a Woman’s Soul: Questions about the Religion of Queen Elizabeth’, Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), 87–110. 49. Collinson, ‘Windows’, 112. 50. ‘Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, to Cecil’, 4 March 1559. CSP 1 (1558–59), 160–161.

Notes 131 51. Margaret Aston, The King’s Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 113–127. 52. ‘And he did vprightly in the sight of the Lord, according to all that Dauid his father had done. He toke away the hie places, and brake the images, and cut down the groues, & brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made’. 53. ‘Moreouer the maruelous diligence and zeale of Iehoshaphat, Iosiah, and Hezekiah are by the singuler prouidence of God left as an example to all godly rulers to reforme their countreys and to establish the worde of God with all spede, lest the wrth of the Lord fall vpon them for the neglecting thereof’ (The Geneva Bible, iiv). 54. Abraham Hartwell, (London, 1565) printed in J. Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols (London: John Nichols & Son, 1788–1805), 1: 171. 55. A full account of the associations of Elizabeth and Hezekiah can be found in Aston, The King’s Bedpost, 113–127. 56. Jean Calvin, Sermons de Jehan Caluin Sur le Cantique que fait le bon Roy Ezechias apres qu’il eut este malade & afflige la main de Dieu (Geneva, 1562), 20. 57. McLaren, Political Culture, 54–56. 58. As Susanne Woods notes, the relationship invoked is surprisingly without apology or acknowledgement of hierarchical difference; Brandon is equated with ‘any Christian’ in profiting from Calvin’s sermons. Susanne Woods, ‘Anne Lock and Aemilia Lanyer: A Tradition of Protestant Women Speaking’, in Form and Reform, 176. 59. Jane Donawerth describes this relationship in terms of a feminine economy of gift exchange; Lock’s box is a gift to be returned, ‘not only to God, Calvin, Lok, and the duchess, but also all ‘‘trewe beleiuyng Christians’’ ’. See ‘Women’s Poetry and the Tudor-Stuart System of Gift Exchange’, in Women, Writing and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. Mary E. Burke et al. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 11. 60. Edward Dering was suspended from preaching after he delivered a sermon at court before Elizabeth in February 1570, indicting the clergy and criticizing Elizabeth for inaction in the face of their corruption. By 1572, however, he was appointed divinity reader at St Paul’s, a position that he used to renew his attacks upon the clergy, criticizing their ignorance and internal disputes in A briefe and Necessarie Catechism (London, 1572). 61. Greene, ‘Anne Lock’s Meditation’, 161, 166. 62. Ibid., 158–159, 166. 63. Hyder Rollins, ed., Tottel’s Miscellany, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1965), 2: 27, 206, 218. 64. R.A. Rebholz, Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), 206–209. 65. Suzanne Trill, ‘ ‘‘Speaking to God in his Phrase and Word’’: Women’s Use of the Psalms in Early Modern England’, in The Nature of Religious Language: A Colloquium, ed. Stanley E. Porter (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 273–277. 66. Carl J. Rasmussen, ‘ ‘‘Quietnesse of Minde’’: A Theatre for Worldlings as Protestant Poetics’, Spenser Studies 1 (1980): 3–27.

132

Notes

67. 68. 69. 70.

Rasmussen, ‘Quietnesse of Minde’, 3–27. See Freccero, ‘The Fig Tree and the Laurel’, 34–40. Rebholz, Works, 206–207. The copytext for the psalm paraphrased and included in part at the margin of each sonnet corresponds most closely to the 1557 Genevan psalter published by Jean Crespin, although at points the text in the margins diverges from the 1557 version and corresponds to the 51st Psalm printed in the Genevan Bible of 1560. In the final four sonnets, however, where the paraphrase deviates from the words of the psalm and previous paraphrases most significantly, the text of the psalm is a close translation of the 1557 Genevan psalter. 71. Greene, ‘Anne Lock’s Meditation’, 163. 72. Rebholz, Works, 209; Clement Marot, Oeuvres (Paris, 1551), 357r.

2

Generating absence: The sonnets of Mary Stuart

1. Jennifer Summit, ‘The Arte of a Ladies Penne: Elizabeth I and the Poetics of Queenship’, ELR 26 (1996): 395–413. Despite the rapid development of scholarship on representations of Elizabeth, by Susan Frye, Carole Levin and Helen Hackett, among others, other discussions of Elizabeth’s selfrepresentations have been surprisingly limited. However, the recent scholarly editions of her writing have generated a set of responses: see Constance Jordan, ‘States of Blindness: Doubt, Justice, and Constancy in Elizabeth I’s ‘‘Avec l’aveugler si estrange’’ ’; and Leah S. Marcus, ‘Queen Elizabeth I as Public and Private Poet: Notes toward a New Edition’, in Reading Monarch’s Writing: The Poetry of Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, and James VI/I, ed. Peter C. Herman (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 109–153; Janel Mueller, ‘Virtue and Virtuality: Gender in the Self-Representations of Queen Elizabeth I’, Form and Reform, 220–246; Clarke, Politics, 204–208. 2. Summit, ‘Arte’, 414–417. 3. In ‘Boredom and Whoredom: Reading Renaissance Women’s Sonnet Sequences’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 10:1 (1997): 165–191, Elizabeth Hanson examines Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and the casket sonnets in order to examine ‘the imperfect alignment of gender ideology and the sources of poetic power’; although it notes ‘rare’ moments of discursive complexity in the casket sonnets attached to key terms of constancy, subjectivity and subjection, the article’s focus on the intersection of Petrarchism and gender produces the familiar narrative of the female sonneteer’s inability to negotiate textual and cultural codes: ‘she effectively deconstructs any position she might occupy’. Lisa Hopkins and Mary E. Burke both offer close readings of the sonnets, with Hopkins discussing the second sonnet only (for reasons of attribution) in terms of its confidence and assumption of authority, whereas Burke analyzes the whole sequence’s negotiation of gender, power and textual agency occasioned by its female sovereign speaker as ‘a mirror of the psyche of a woman battling to reconcile the contrary positions of ruler and woman’. Like Betty Travitsky, neither Hopkins nor Burke discuss the attribution debate fully, but use selective evidence to support

Notes 133

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

their assumptions of authenticity. By contrast, Peter C. Herman’s recent essay ‘ ‘‘mes subjectz, mon ame assubjectie’’: The Problematic (of) Subjectivity in Mary Stuart’s Sonnets’, in Reading Monarchs Writing, 51–78, is the most detailed discussion of the sonnets to date; although he attributes them to Mary in his analysis, arguing for her complex and often contradictory manipulation of gender politics in the sonnets, he notes their continued significance if forgeries as they ‘testify to the contemporary recognition of a distinctly feminine lyric voice’. Similarly, Sarah Dunnigan’s nuanced and provocative feminist analysis of the sonnets leaves the question of their attribution open. Lisa Hopkins, Writing Renaissance Queens: Texts by and about Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 81–83; Mary E. Burke, ‘Queen, Lover, Poet: A Question of Balance in the Sonnets of Mary, Queen of Scots’, in Women, Writing and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. Mary E. Burke et al. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 101–118; Betty Travitsky, The Paradise of Women: Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 187–191; Sarah M. Dunnigan, Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 15–45. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History, 48–49, 72–74. See Ian McFarlane, Buchanan (London: Duckworth, 1981), 348–350. Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 36–37. Cambridge, MS Oo. 7. 47., fols. 46r–49r. Peter Davidson has recently argued that the presence of this manuscript within a collection of other midsixteenth-century materials highly incriminating to Mary suggests that they were prepared as part of a dossier of documents ‘intended to be proof that Mary was guilty of murder’. While possible, the argument needs development – it cannot rest on material proximity to other documents alone, and his assumptions about authorial intention are necessarily speculative. The print source might equally have been the copytext for the manuscript, and Davidson does not discuss the possibility that the Scots marginals were not contemporary, but added to explicate and identify a biographical context after the event. Peter Davidson, ‘New Evidence Concerning Mary Queen of Scots’, History Scotland 1 (2001): 28–34. His article might also be compared to Hans Villius’ argument for the authenticity of the letters, which isolates differences in the portrayal of Darnley and the queen in the casket letters and in other documents produced by the Scottish lords. He argues that the absence of direct reference to murder in the casket letters, in contrast to the more specific references of Lennox’s indictments and the Book of Articles, shows a surprising and anomalous tentativeness of the part of the forgers. Hans Villius, ‘The Casket Letters: A Famous Case Reopened’, The Historical Journal 28 (1985): 517–534. Jenny Wormald, Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure (London: Collins & Brown, 1991), 177–178. CSP Scot II, 398. This theory originated in Robert Gore-Brown, Lord Bothwell (London: Collins, 1937), 99–109. He was followed by M.P. Willcocks, Mary Queen of Scots (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1939), 301–303; M.H. Armstrong

134

11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

Notes Davison, The Casket Letters: A Solution to the Mystery of Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley (London: Vision Press, 1956), 206–221; H.F. Diggle, The Casket Letters of Mary Stuart: A Study in Fraud and Forgery (Harrogate: R. Ackrill, 1960), 99–109; George Donaldson, The First Trial of Mary, Queen of Scots (London: Batsford, 1969), 73. See Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 107–114; Summit, Lost Property, 163–202; and Clarke, Politics, 203–208. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990). McFarlane, Buchanan, 325. The Copie of a Letter written by one in London to his frend concernyng the credit of the late published detection of doyinges of the Ladie Marie of Scotland (n.p., n.d.), fol. A iii r., quoted in McFarlane (1981), 327. James Emerson Phillips, Images of a Queen: Mary Stuart in Sixteenth-Century Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964). McLaren, Political Culture, 171–182. McFarlane, Buchanan, 340. Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 65–82. Buchanan, Ane Detectiovn, R3r. All subsequent references are to this edition. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose, eds, Elizabeth I: Collected Works (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 133–134. Kevin Sharpe, ‘The King’s Writ: Royal Authors and Royal Authority in Early Modern England’, in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 119–123. Summit, ‘Arte of a Ladies Penne’, 412. For accounts of female complaint, see John Kerrigan, Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); and Go ¨ tz Schmitz, The Fall of Women in Early English Narrative Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Peter Herman makes a similar point in ‘Subjectivity in Mary Stuart’s Sonnets’; however, because he attributes the sequence to Mary, he reads this as an articulation of ‘her personal subjectivity while destroying her political subjectivity’ – an abdication of the throne to Bothwell. Herman, ‘Subjectivity in Mary Stuart’s Sonnets’, 77. John Staines notes a similar ambivalence towards Elizabeth’s political rhetoric in Spenser’s 1596 examination of the sciences of rhetoric and politics in the Faerie Queene. John D. Staines, ‘Elizabeth, Mercilla, and the Rhetoric of Propaganda in Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31:2 (2001): 283–312. His article participates in a critical re-evaluation of representations of Elizabeth to include a persistent strand of cultural negativity; see Julia M. Walker, ed., Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998). Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, 7–8. I[sabella] W[hitney], The Copy of a Letter, Lately Written in Meeter, by a Yonge Gentilwoman: To her Unconstant Lover . . . (London, 1567), and A sweet Nosgay,

Notes 135

28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

or Pleasant Posye: Contayning a Hundred and Ten Phylosophicall Flowers (London, 1573). For an example of the critical view arguing for women’s difficulty in negotiating the gender codes of the Petrarchan sonnet sequence, see Waller, Sidney Family Romance, 196. George Turbervile, The Heroycall Epistles of . . . Publius Ovidius Naso (London, 1567). I[sabella] W[hitney], The Copy of a Letter, A3v. Danielle Clarke, ed., Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer: Renaissance Women Poets (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), xiv, and ‘ ‘‘Formd into word by your divided lips’’: Women, Rhetoric and the Ovidian Tradition’, ‘This Double Voice’, 78. Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 63–91. Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 122–128. Dunnigan, Eros and Poetry, 19–20. Ibid., 28–29. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 33. My argument also resituates Jenny Wormald’s location of textual innovation in the sonnets’ construction of feminine sexual masochism: a woman utterly dominated by a man, one who would renounce everything for him, who masochistically dwells on her sacrifice – ‘my peace, my subjects, my subjected soul’ – and on the fact that he had raped her before she first loved him: the archetype, in other words, of the woman who adores the man who tramples on her. (Wormald, Mary Queen of Scots, 178)

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

This figure is the typical speaker of female complaint; the subject of abuse, frequently physical, who nonetheless either laments her lover’s loss or desires his return to right the wrongs inflicted upon her. Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Bess Carey’s Petrarch: Newly Discovered Elizabethan Sonnets’, The Review of English Studies 50 (1999): 304–319. Jamie Reid-Baxter, ‘Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross: 3500 New Lines of Verse’, in Woman and the Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing, ed. Sarah M. Dunnigan, C. Marie Harker and Evelyn S. Newlyn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 195–200. John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, Piae Afflicti Animi Consolationes (Paris, 1574), 40. Bodleian, MS Arch. F.c.8., fol. 8r. All subsequent references are to this manuscript. PRO. SP. 53. 2., fol. 64r. Fraser (1969), 469–470. P.J. Holmes, ‘Mary Stuart in England’, in Mary Stewart: Queen in Three Kingdoms, ed. Michael Lynch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 212. CSP Scot. VI, 419–425, 426–427. Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 37.

136

3

Notes

The politics of prosopopoeia: The Pandora sonnets

1. The term ‘collection’ rather than sequence is used here, as six poems, only four of which take the sonnet form, could not constitute a sequence equivalent, for example, to Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. However, as the only aggregate of sonnets published under the signature of a woman writer between the examples of Mary Stuart and Lady Mary Wroth, it warrants inclusion in this study. 2. Ellen Moody, ‘Six Elegaic Poems, Possibly by Anne Cecil de Vere, Countess of Oxford’, ELR 19 (1989): 152–170. 3. Louise Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 85–93. 4. Walker, Women Writers, 61–62; Nona Fienberg, ‘Mary Wroth’s poetics of the self’, SEL 42 (2002): 121–137. 5. Marion Wynne-Davies, sel. and ed., Women Poets of the Renaissance (London: J.M. Dent, 1998), 353–354. 6. Wynne-Davies offers no evidence for this adoption of Oxford’s style on Anne de Vere’s part; presumably she is referring to the Pandora sonnets here, and is assuming Anne de Vere’s authorship in a circular argument to justify the attribution. Wynne-Davies, Women Poets, 353. 7. During a five-year estrangement from Oxford, Anne de Vere lived in her parental house until a reconciliation with her husband at the end of 1582. B.M. Ward, The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford: 1550–1604 (London: John Murray, 1928), 125–126. 8. Lansdowne MS 104., fols. 195v–214r. 9. Ibid. 104., fol. 197v. 10. Ibid. 104., fol. 203r. My translation is as follows: But your companions falter in your praise, Pandora: He who is the author of the gift is also a companion of the praise. 11. Dora and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora’s Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), 68. 12. Leicester Bradner, The Poems of Queen Elizabeth I (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1964), 76. The poem is not reproduced in the Marcus, Mueller and Rose edition of Elizabeth’s collected works. 13. Although the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia is usually defined as a figure of speech in which inanimate objects or abstract ideas are endowed with human qualities or action, it occasionally is given a second definition as speech in character of impersonation. Here, however, I am also drawing upon Paul de Man’s use of the term in The Rhetoric of Romanticism as the ‘figure of prosopopoiea, the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech . . . Prosopopoeia is the trope of autobiography, by which one’s name, as in a Milton poem, is made as intelligible and memorable as a face.’ Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 76. 14. Philippe Desportes, Cartels et Masquarades, E´pitaphes (Geneva and Paris: Librairie Droz, 1958). All subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers are given in the text.

Notes 137 15. The images of lines 5–6, ‘With my Sone, my Gold, my Nightingale, and Rose / Is gone’, are glossed in the left-hand margin as ‘Gold, the best of all mettelles. Nightingale, the sweetest of all byrdes. And Roses the fairest of all flowers’, and may be derived from Desportes’ third epitaph to Claude de Laubespine III, which concludes with a section regretting the tendency of destiny to take the best from the mortal world: Tuant les rossignols, il laisse les corbeaux: Espargnant les buissons, il moissonne la rose. Entre tant de milliers son coup malicieux A bien sceu remarquer ce chef-d’œuvre des cieux, Et ravir tout l’honneur, de ce monde ou` nous sommes. Ce qu’est l’herbe a` la terre, a` l’herbage les fleurs, L’or aux autres metaux, la blancheur aux couleurs, Cher amy, tu l’estois a` la race des hommes. (86–87) 16. Philippe Desportes, E´le´gies (Geneva and Paris: Librairie Droz, 1961), 50. 17. Duncan-Jones, ‘Bess Carey’s Petrarch’, 304–319. 18. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Wilcox and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 252–253. 19. Anne Lake Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), 102, 108. 20. Janet G. Scott, Les Sonnets E´lisabe´thains (Paris: Honore´ Champion, 1929), 13. 21. Philippe Desportes, Les Amours de Diane (Geneva and Paris: Librairie Droz, 1959), 75. 22. Wynne-Davis, Women Poets, 352. 23. Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, 20. 24. Ibid., 25. 25. Ibid., 33. 26. Prescott, French Poets, 81. 27. Ibid., 91, 106. 28. Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 4–5. 29. Rosemary Kegl, ‘ ‘‘Those Terrible Aproches’’: Sexuality, Social Mobility, and Resisting the Courtliness of Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie’, ELR 20 (1990): 198. 30. Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 247. 31. Le´on van der Essen, Alexandre Farne`se, Prince de Parme, Gouverner Ge´ne´ral des Pays Bas, 3 vols (Brussels: Librairie Nationale d’Art et d’Histoire, 1934), 3: 13–38. 32. Pieter Geyl, The Revolt of the Netherlands, 1555–1609 (London: Williams & Norgate, 1932), 183–184. 33. George Steevens to the editor, The European Magazine and London Review ( June 1788), 389–391. 34. St John Chrysostome, An Exposition Upon the Epistle of S. Paule the Apostle to the Ephesians (London, 1581). 35. Nicholas Hemming, The Epistle of the Blessed Apostle Saint Paule, which he, in the Time of His Trouble and Imprisonment, Sent in Writing from Rome to the Ephesians, trans. Abraham Fleming (London, 1581).

138

Notes

36. John Brooke, A Christian Discourse upon Certeine Poynts of Religion (London, 1578), and Of Two Wonderful Popish Monsters, to wyt, Of a Popish Asse Which Was Found in Rome in the River Tyber (1496), and of a Monkish Calfe, Calved at Friberge in Misne (London, 1579). 37. Geoffrey Fenton, Golden Epistles (London, 1575). 38. Martyn Rody, From Revolt to Independence: The Netherlands 1550–1650 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990), 58–60. 39. Simon Adams, The Protestant Cause: Religious Alliance with the West European Calvinist Communities as a Political Issue in England, 1585–1630 (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 1972), 46–64. 40. Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 314. 41. Ibid., 245–246. 42. George Puttenham, ‘Partheniades’ in Ancient Critical Essays upon English Poets and Poesy, ed. Joseph Haslewood, 2 vols (London: Robert Triphook, 1811–15), 1: xxx. 43. Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, 18. 44. Ward, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, 102. 45. Ibid., 114. 46. Hatfield, MSS Cal. XIII. 144, quoted in Ward, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, 115. 47. The Earl of Oxford to Lord Burghley, Greenwich, 27 April 1576, HMC Salisbury II, 132–133. 48. Lansdowne, MSS, 102. 2. fols. 3r–v. 49. E.K. Chambers, Sir Henry Lee: An Elizabethan Portrait (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 155–156. The son was knighted by James I in 1607 for his military service, and was also a scholar translating the Greek histories of Polybius. Gwynneth Bowen, ‘Sir Edward Vere and His Mother, Anne Vavasour’, Shakespearean Authorship Review 15 (1966): 4, A letter from John Hampden to John Eliot, 1732, characterized Vere as ‘all summer in the field, all winter in his study; in whose fall fame makes this kingdom a great loser’. 50. His involvement with Catholicism may also have contributed to his alienation from the court; having made a secret profession of his Catholicism with Henry Howard, Francis Southwell and Charles Arundel in 1576, in December 1580 he betrayed this profession to the queen. The other three men were restrained for a period of four months and questioned, but as the Queen was already aware of their Catholicism and was satisfied that there had been no conspiracy against the state, the accusations rebounded upon Oxford. It is uncertain whether Oxford’s confinement to the Tower concerned the Catholic conspiracy or the Vavasour affair; however, the details of Walsingham’s letter and of a letter from the Privy Council to Sir William Gorges at Oxford’s release, stating that ‘His Lordship was not committed thither upon any cause of treason or any criminal cause,’ suggests that the Vavasour scandal was the main factor in his fall from royal favour. Ward, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, 206–238. 51. Lansdowne MSS, 104. 63. fol. 164r. 52. Ibid., 104. 63. fol. 166r. 53. May, ‘Countess of Oxford’s Sonnets’, 15–16. 54. ‘De Luy-mesme’, Desportes, Cartels et Masquarades, 82. 55. Pamela S. Hammons, Poetic Resistance: English Women Writers and the Early Modern Lyric (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 28–32.

Notes 139 56. Moody, ‘Six Elegaic Poems’, 165. 57. See Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 6.

4

The politics of withdrawal: Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and Lindamira’s Complaint

1. Josephine Roberts, ed., The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 31–35. 2. Walker, Women Writers, 175–176; Beilin, Redeeming Eve, 211; Elizabeth Hanson, ‘Boredom and Whoredom’, 178–179. 3. Jeffrey Masten, ‘ ‘‘Shall I turne blabb?’’: Circulation, Gender, and Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Sonnets’, in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 84. 4. Wall, Imprint of Gender, 337. 5. Gary Waller, Sidney Family Romance, 109, 129–130. Although Waller’s first reference to the scandal typically cites Denny’s exhortations that Wroth ‘follow the lead of her aunt’ in writing devotional texts and reads his hostility as a response to ‘an act of sexual defiance’, Waller’s later discussion is careful to incorporate some of Wroth’s response to Denny, and interprets her letter to Buckingham in less causal terms than Roberts does, seeing the letters as an expression of fear of official action. 6. Maureen Quilligan, ‘The Constant Subject: Instability and Female Authority in Wroth’s Urania Poems’, in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 308; Lewalski, Writing Women, 249. 7. Moody, ‘Six Elegaic Poems’, 164. 8. May Nelson Paulissen, The Love Sonnets of Lady Mary Wroth: A Critical Introduction (Salzburg: Institut fu ¨ r Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1982), 29–30; B.G. MacCarthy, Women Writers: Their Contribution to the English Novel, 1621–1744 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1946), 62–63. 9. It is possible that Josephine Roberts has constructed these events as a narrative because Wroth has used the old style of dates, which would mean that Denny responded to the text in February 1621, prompting Wroth to write to the Duke of Buckingham nine months later, withdrawing the text from sale. Given the heated and rapid nature of their exchange, however, such a delay seems unlikely. There are several problems with this theory, not the least of which is Roberts’ consistent use of dates in the new style in her text: she signals no shift to the old style of dates with reference to the Denny/Wroth correspondence. It would also mean that Denny had access to a manuscript copy of the Urania five months before its publication, unlikely because of its size and Wroth’s use of a printed copy as a presentation copy to the Duke of Buckingham, suggesting that she circulated a printed text (rather than a manuscript) in pre-existent systems of manuscript exchange. 10. Roberts, Poems, 247.

140

Notes

11. Barbara Lewalski also argues that the letter reads more like a conventional pro forma disclaimer to avoid trouble than like true angst: Wroth indicates with some pride that she expects real difficulty in getting people to relinquish their copies, and asks Buckingham to set a good example by returning the presentation copy she sent to him. Pretty clearly she expected (and expects) him to enjoy the work. (Lewalski, Writing Women, 249) 12. Again, Maureen Quilligan’s account is an exception to this, noting that Wroth sends her answering poem to Denny and to friends who might intercede on her behalf. Quilligan, ‘The Constant Subject’, 308. 13. Roberts, Poems, 34. 14. Ibid., 237 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 242. The references to drunkenness and ‘the same Jury hee taulks of’ indicate that the accompanying documents are copies of their correspondence. 17. Masten, ‘Shall I turne blabb’, 84. 18. Wall, Imprint of Gender, 331–338. 19. Waller, Sidney Family Romance, 196. 20. Ibid., 191–219. 21. Walker, Women Writers, 188–190; Mary B. Moore, ‘The Labyrinth of Style: Lady Mary Wroth and the Idea of Petrarchism’, Desiring Voices, 127. There are limited exceptions: while she finds that Masten ‘demonstrates convincingly’ that the sonnets must be read in relation to their circulation context, Danielle Clarke takes issue with Masten’s construction of the Petrarchism as delineating difficulties for female subjectivity, rather than ‘subjectivity per se’. Clarke, Politics, 214–216; Nona Fienberg revises her earlier emphasis on ‘Wroth’s poetry’s privacy’ in favour of a negotiation of ‘the complex territory of both private and public, familial and mythological discourses’, in ‘Mary Wroth’s Poetics’, 127. 22. Luckyj, Gender and Silence, 140–146. 23. For analyses of the sequence either preceding Roberts’ account of its suppression or emphasizing a public dimension to the text, see Elaine V. Beilin, ‘ ‘‘The Onely Perfect Vertue’’: Constancy in Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’, Spenser Studies 2 (1981), 229–245; Paulissen, Love Sonnets, 131, 133; Naomi J. Miller, ‘Rewriting Lyric Fictions: The Role of the Lady in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’, in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 295–310. 24. Beilin claims Wroth adopted the conventions of the Elizabethan sonnet sequence of the 1590s, ‘yet she radically changed the tradition by making her sonnetteer a woman’. Roberts suggests that ‘through the creation of a female persona, she was the first English writer to reverse the sexual roles within a complete sonnet collection’. Waller identifies it as ‘the first collection of Petrarchan love poetry in English by a woman’. Moore locates the operation of ‘a fairly effective system of social sanctions that informally prohibited women’s amatory work in print’, and finds amatory work

Notes 141

25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

predating 1640 ‘severely limited’. Beilin, Redeeming Eve, 232; Roberts, Poems, 48; Waller, Sidney Family Romance, 191; Moore, Desiring Voices, 130. Dubrow, Echoes of Desire, 147–148. ‘his Maiestie had once married her before which was to the kingdome of Pamphilia, from which Husband shee could not bee diuorced, nor euer would haue other, if it might please him to giue her leave, to enioy that happinesse’ (Beilin, Redeeming Eve, 241). Roberts, Poems, 99–100. G.F. Waller, ed., The Triumph of Death and Other Unpublished and Uncollected Poems by Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (1561–1621) (Salzburg: Institut fu ¨r Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1977), 92–95. Margaret Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 82. Edwin Greenlaw et al., eds, The Works of Edmund Spenser: The Minor Poems, 2 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1943), 1: 161. Roberts, Poems, 180. Margaret Hannay also suggests that the Queen of Naples might be asssociated with Mary Sidney. Margaret P. Hannay, ‘ ‘‘Your vertuous and learned Aunt’’: The Countess of Pembroke as a Mentor to Mary Wroth’, in Reading Mary Wroth, ed. Miller and Waller, 25–30. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A.D. Melville and intro. E.J. Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 363–364. Mary Wroth’s relationship with her cousin William Herbert could be related to this project of keeping the Sidneian tradition alive. An important early text in the construction of Philip Sidney as martyr for the Protestant cause, Thomas Moffett’s Nobilis (1593) was presented to Herbert as a New Year’s gift, and presents Philip Sidney’s life as a template for Herbert’s own: ‘Therefore do you embrace, cherish, and imitate him, your second self.’ Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix, 80–81. If Herbert is to be viewed in these terms, then another aspect of Wroth’s inheritance of the role of Mary Sidney could lie in her promotion of Philip Sidney through his replacement, Herbert. This strategy parallels Mary Sidney’s revival of her brother’s name and reputation. However, this interpretation is problematized by the ambivalent representation of the figure of Amphilanthus in the Urania, to whom one of Herbert’s poems is attributed. Louise Schleiner considers Wroth’s ambivalent representation of Pembroke as Amphilanthus in the Urania, and argues that she is retrospectively presenting her relationship with Pembroke in relatively sanitized terms against court gossip. Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, 156–163. David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (New York and London: Routledge, 1984), 207, 216–221. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, 197–199. George Wither, Abuses Stript and Whipt (London, 1613). Phyllis Brooks Bartlett, ed., The Poems of George Chapman (New York: Modern Languages Ass. of America, 1941), 400. As a contrast to this Protestant construction of Mary Wroth, the sonnet to Susan Herbert refers briefly to a more generalized fame and virtue, but deals largely with poetic rivalry and potential patronage. Joshuah Sylvester, The Complete Works of Joshuah Sylvester, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1880), 2: 282–284.

142

Notes

39. Jonson’s Works and George Chapman’s collection of the works of Homer were published in 1616, Joshua Sylvester’s collected works in 1620/21, and George Wither’s collected works were published under the title Juvenilia in 1622. 40. Roberts, Poems, 27. 41. Robert Newton, The Countess of Mountgomeries Evsebeia (1620); John Donne, Letters to Several Persons of Honour (1651), 24–26. 42. John Grismand and John Marriot jointly published, with Augustine Mathewes as printer, Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion, Parts 1 and 2; George Wither, Wither’s Motto (1621); and Faire-Virtue (1622). Individually, John Grismand published Wither’s Emblems (1635) with Augustine Mathewes as printer; independently of Mathewes, Grismand also published Wither’s Britain’s Remembrancer (1628) and Juvenilia (1633), and John Marriot published Davies’ Overburies Wife (1616). Michelle O’Callaghan, ‘Three Jacobean Spenserians: William Browne, George Wither, and Christopher Brooke’ (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 1993), 344. 43. See Margaret Anne Witten-Hannah, ‘Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania: The Work and the Tradition’ (PhD diss., University of Auckland, 1978), 66–107; and Roberts, Poems, 70. 44. Blair Worden, ‘Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution’, in History and Imagination: Essays in honour of H.R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden (London: Duckworth, 1981), 187–188. 45. Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville, 2 vols (Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd, 1938), 1: 133. 46. C.H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, eds, Ben Jonson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 7: 161–180. 47. Hardin Aasand, ‘ ‘‘To blanch an Ethiop, and revive a corse’’: Queen Anne and The Masque of Blackness’, SEL 32 (1992): 282–283. 48. Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 103–105. 49. Hall, Things of Darkness, 110. Kim Hall’s reading of this poem, however, follows the critical emphasis upon women’s lack of poetic agency and textual confinement to the private sphere, arguing that the subject’s hidden ‘sacrifices’ are her poems, ‘private art’ that go unrecognized, ‘while male poets can speak publicly of their loves and circulate their ‘‘sacrifices’’ or poems’. Hall, Things of Darkness, 106–107. 50. Heather Dubrow also comments upon Wroth’s shifting constructions of Cupid, but attributes this to the multiple roles played by the female subject, and Wroth’s own ‘projecting onto her mythological characters the multiple and often contradictory roles she herself assumes’. Dubrow, Echoes of Desire, 158–159. 51. See Revelations 6: 12: ‘And I behelde when he had opened the sixt seale, and lo, there was a great earthquake, & the sunne was as blacke as sackecloth of heere, and the moone was like blood.’ 52. David Norbrook, ‘ ‘‘The Masque of Truth’’: Court Entertainments and International Protestant Politics in the Early Stuart Period’, The Seventeenth Century 1 (1986): 90. 53. William Browne, Britannia’s Pastorals (London, 1616), 73–109.

Notes 143 54. Norbrook, ‘Masque of Truth’, 104–105. 55. Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Designing Women: The Self as Spectacle in Mary Wroth and Veronica Franco’, in Reading Mary Wroth, ed. Miller and Waller, 135–153. It is possible that the speaker’s hope that ‘pure thoughts discharge the score / Of debts for mee’ had some material result: in 1621, James issued a warrant to the Earl of Salisbury to provide her with deer from the king’s forest. CSP 21 (1619–23): 278. 56. Linking the structure of the sequence with Jonsonian masque, Anita Hagerman notes that the careful ‘mathematical architecture’ of the corona’s 14 sonnets is followed by a concluding set of sonnets and songs that number 13 rather than 14; she intriguingly suggests that this structure signals an incompleteness to the final order and fulfilment advocated by the sequence’s concluding poems. Anita Hagerman, ‘ ‘‘But Worth pretends’’: Discovering Jonsonian Masque in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’, Early Modern Literary Studies 6:3 (2001): 4.10–11 . 57. See Masten, ‘Shall I turne blabb’, 79; Quilligan, ‘The Constant Subject’, 325–327; and Roberts, Poems, 30–31. 58. For a detailed discussion of contemporary documents relating to Wroth’s illegitimate children, see Josephine A. Roberts, ed., The First Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995), lxxiv–lxxv. All further references that are given in the text are to this edition. 59. Danielle Clarke, ‘Translation, Interpretation and Gender: Women’s Writing c.1595–1644’ (unpublished dissertation, University of Oxford, 1994), 252–253. 60. Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘The Biopolitics of Romance in Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania’, ELR 31:1 (2001): 110. 61. Jacques Derrida, Signe´ponge, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 114. 62. Simon Adams, ‘Spain or the Netherlands? The Dilemmas of Early Stuart Foreign Policy’, in Before the English Civil War: Essays on Early Stuart Politics and Government, ed. Howard Tomlinson (London: Macmillan, 1983), 92. 63. Masten, ‘Shall I turne blabb’, 79. 64. Roberts, Urania, lxxiv–lxxv. Barbara Lewalski argues, however, that the relationship and its offspring were not notorious in the court, noting an absence of reference in the correspondence of Chamberlain and Carleton, and in Lord Denny’s attacks upon the Urania. Lewalski, Writing Women, 248. 65. Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, 7–8. 66. Compare the text’s denial of feminine monarchical self-sovereignty in an erotic context with Maureen Quilligan’s arguments for Wroth’s identification with monarchical absolutism as an aid to the development of a female subjectivity. Quilligan, ‘The Constant Subject’, 327. 67. Lewalski, Writing Women, 249. 68. Wroth’s presence in Anne’s early court is indicated by her participation in the Masque of Blackness, but she is absent from Earl of Worcester’s list of the ladies of the queen’s court in 1603, a list that includes others of the Protestant circle of courtiers centred around the Countess of Bedford with whom Wroth was associated. Whatever Wroth’s status in Anne’s court, references to

144

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

Notes her participation in its activities cease after 1608, leading to the critical assumption that the prose narrative relating to Lindamira’s fall from courtly favour is Wroth’s version of events leading to an earlier retirement from the court. See Leeds Barroll, ‘The Court of the First Stuart Queen’, in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 203–204. Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘Patronage and Class in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’, Women, Writing and the Reproduction of Culture, 45–46. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ‘Anne of Denmark and the Subversions of Masquing’, Criticism 25 (1993): 342–346. For copies of her extant correspondence with Carleton, see Roberts, Urania, 235–236. D.J.H. Clifford, ed., The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1990), 61. William A. Oram et al., eds, The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 261. Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, 224–226. All further references are to this edition and are given in the text. Bartnett, ed., Poems of George Chapman, 400.

Conclusion 1. Roberts, ‘Phallacies of Authorship’, 49.

Bibliography Primary sources Unpublished Bodleian Library, MS Arch. F. c. 8. British Library, Addit. MS 22601. British Library, Cotton. MS Julius F.x. British Library, Lansdowne, MS 19. British Library, Lansdowne, MS 102. British Library, Lansdowne, MS 104. British Library, MS Stowe. 158. Cambridge, MS Oo. 7. 47. Cambridge, MS Ii. 5. 37. Newberry Library Case, MS fY. 1565. W95. Public Record Office, SP. 53. 2.

Published Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso. Translated by Sir John Harington. Edited and introduced by Robert McNulty. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Breton, Nicholas. The Works in Verse and Prose of Nicholas Breton. Edited by Alexander B. Grosart. 2 vols. New York: AMS Press, 1966. Brinkelow, Henry. Complaynt of Roderyck Mors and The Lamentacyon of a Christen agaynst the Cytye of London. Edited by J. Meadows Cowper. London: N. Trau ¨ bner & Co., 1874. Brooke, John, trans. A Christian Discourse upon Certeine Poynts of Religion. London, 1578. ——. Of Two Wonderful Popish Monsters, to wyt, Of a Popish Asse which was found in Rome in the River Tyber (1496), and of a Monkish Calfe, Calved at Friberge in Misne. London, 1579. Browne, William. Britannia’s Pastorals. London, 1619. Buchanan, George. Ane Detectiovn of the duinges of Marie, Quene of Scottes. London, 1571. Calvin, Jean. Le Psaultier. Geneva, 1558. ——. Sermons de Jehan Caluin Sur le Cantique que fait le bon Roy Ezechias Apres qu’il eut este malade & afflige de la main de Dieu. Geneva, 1562. ——. Commentary on the Book of Psalms. Translated by James Anderson. 5 vols. Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845–49. ——. Sermons on Isaiah’s Prophecy of the Death and Passion of Christ. Translated and edited by T.H.L. Parker. London: Clarke, 1956. ——. Letters of John Calvin. 4 vols. Edited by Jules Bonnet. 1858. Reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1972. ——. Letters of John Calvin Selected from the Bonnet Edition. Edinburgh and Carlisle, Pa.: Banner of Truth Trust, 1980. 145

146

Bibliography

Chapman, George. The Poems of George Chapman. Edited by Phyllis Brooks Bartlett. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1941. Chrysostome, St John. An Exposition Upon the Epistle of S. Paule the Apostle to the Ephesians. London, 1581. Clifford, Lady Anne. The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford. Edited by D.J.H. Clifford. Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1990. Colonna, Vittoria. Rime de la Divina Vittoria Colonna Marchesa di Pescara. Parma, 1538. ——. Rima della diva Vittoria Colonna da Pescara. Venice, 1544. ——. Tutte le Rime della Illustriss. Et Eccelentiss. Signora Vittoria Colonna. Marchesana di Pescara. Edited by Girolamo Ruscelli. Venice, 1558. ——. Rime della S. Vittoria Colonna, Marchesana Illust. Di Pescara. Edited by Ludovico Dolce. Venice, 1559. Crespin, Jean. The Form of Prayer & Ministration of the Sacraments Used in the English Congregation at Geneva & Approved by the Famous & Godly Learned Man John Calvin. Geneva, 1556. Daniel, Samuel. The Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Samuel Daniel. Edited by Alexander B. Grosart. London and Aylesbury: Hazell, Watson & Viney Ltd, 1885. Dekker, Thomas. The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker. Edited by Fredson Bowers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953. Deloney, Thomas. The Works of Thomas Deloney. Edited by Francis Oscar Mann. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912. Dering, Edward. Certaine Godly and Verie Comfortable Letters, Full of Christian Consolation. London, 1590. Desportes, Philippe. Cartels et Masquarades, E´pitaphes. Geneva and Paris: Librairie Droz, 1958. ——. Les Amours de Diane. Geneva and Paris: Librairie Droz, 1959. ——. E´le´gies. Geneva and Paris: Librairie Droz, 1961. Donne, John. Letters to Several Persons of Honour. London, 1651. Drue, Thomas. The Life of the Dutches of Suffolke. London, 1631. Elizabeth I. A Godly Meditation of the Soul. London, 1548. ——. The Poems of Queen Elizabeth I. Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1964. ——. Collected Works. Edited by Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Fane, Mildmay. The Poems of Mildmay, 2nd Earl of Westmoreland (1648). Manchester: Charles E. Simms, 1879. Fenton, Geoffrey. Golden Epistles. London, 1575. Foxe, John. The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe. Revised and corrected by Josiah Pratt, and introduced by John Stoughton. 4th Edition. 8 vols. London: Religious Tract Society, 1877. Gambara, Veronica. Le Rime. Edited by Alan Bullock. Florence: Olschki, 1995. Googe, Barnabe. Eclogues, Epitaphs and Sonnets. Edited by Judith M. Kennedy. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1989. Greville, Fulke. Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville. Edited by Geoffrey Bullough. 2 vols. Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd, 1938. Grimald, Nicholas. The Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald. Edited by Le Roy Merrill. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925. Guillet, Pernette du. Rymes. Edited by Victor E. Graham. Geneva and Paris: Librairie Droz, 1968.

Bibliography 147 Hemming, Nicholas. The Epistle of the Blessed Apostle Saint Paule, which He, in the Time of His Trouble and Imprisonment, Sent in Writing from Rome to the Ephesians. Translated by Abraham Fleming. London, 1581. Herbert, Edward. The Poems English and Latin of Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Edited by G.C. Moore Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923. Heywoode, Thomas. Gunaikeion; or, Nine Bookes of Various History, Concerninge Women. London, 1624. Hooker, Thomas. The Sovles Preparation for Christ. London, 1623. Hughey, Ruth, ed. The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1960. James I. Basilikon Doron. London, 1599. Jonson, Ben. The Masques of Blackness and of Beauty. London, 1608. ——. Ben Jonson. Edited by C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson. 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–63. Knox, John. The Works of John Knox. Edited by David Laing. 6 vols. Edinburgh: Bannatyne Society, 1846–64. Labe´, Louise. Oeuvres Poe´tiques, et Pernette du Guillet, Rymes. Edited by Franc¸oise Charpentier. Paris: Gallimard, 1983. ——. Louise Labe´’s Complete Works. Translated and edited by Edith R. Farrell. Troy, New York: Whitson Publishing Company, 1986. Leslie, John. Piae Afflicti Animi Consolationes. Paris, 1574. L[ock], A[nne], trans. Sermons of John Calvin, Vpon the Songes that Ezechias Made After he had bene Sicke. London, 1560. ——. Of the Markes of the Children of God. By Jean Taffin. London, 1590. ——. Mrs Locke’s Little Book. 1560. Reprint, London: Olive Tree, 1973. ——. The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock. Edited by Susan M. Felch. Tempe, AZ: Renaissance English Text Society, 1999. Lok, Henry. Sundry Christian Passions. London, 1593. Lyly, John. The Complete Works of John Lyly. Edited by R.W. Banded. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902. Marot, Clement. Oeuvres. Paris, 1551. Marot, Clement and Theodore de Be`ze. Les Pseavmes mis en rime Franc¸oise. Lyons, 1563. Navarre, Marguerite de. Les Dernieres Poesies de Marguerite de Navarre. Paris: A. Colin, 1896. ——. The Heptameron of the Tales of Margaret, Queen of Navarre. London: Navarre Society, 1905. Newton, Robert. The Covntesse of Movntgomeries Evsebeia. London, 1620. Ovid, P. Metamorphoses. Translated by A.D. Melville and introduced by E.J. Kenny. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. ——. Heroı¨des. Translated by Harold Isbell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. Parr, Catherine. Prayers or Meditations. London, 1545. ——. The Lamentacion of a Sinner. London, 1547. Petrarca, Francesco. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics. Translated and edited by Robert M. Durling. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1976. Puttenham, George. Partheniades. In Ancient Critical Essays upon English Poets and Poesy. Edited by Joseph Haslewood. 2 vols. London: Robert Triphook, 1811–15. ——. The Arte of English Poesie. Edited by Gladys Doidge Wilcox and Alice Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936.

148

Bibliography

Roches, Madeleine and Catherine des. Les Oeuvres. Edited by Anne R. Larsen. Geneva and Paris: Librairie Droz, 1993. Ronsard, Pierre de. Les Poe`mes. Paris, 1578. ——. Oeuvres Comple`tes de P. de Ronsard. Edited by Paul Laumonier. 8 vols. Paris: Lemerre, 1914–19. Russell, Lady Elizabeth. A Way of Reconciliation of a Good and Learned Man, Touching the Truth, Nature and Substance of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Sacrament. London, 1605. Sidney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke. The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke. New York: New York University Press, 1963. ——. The Triumph of Death and Other Unpublished and Uncollected Poems by Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (1560–1621). Edited by G.F. Waller. Salzburg: Institut fu ¨ r Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1977. Sidney, Sir Philip. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney. Edited by William A. Ringler. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Soowthern, John. Pandora, The Musyque of the Beautie, of His Mistresse Diana. London, 1584. Spenser, Edmund. The Works of Edmund Spenser: The Minor Poems. Edited by Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, and Frederick Morgan Padelford. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1943. Stampa, Gaspara. Selected Poems. Edited and translated by Laura Anna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie. New York: Italica Press, 1994. Stuart, Mary. The Genuine Letters of Mary Queen of Scots to James Earl of Bothwell. Translated by Edward Simmonds. London, 1726. ——. A Sonnet, Supposed to have been Written by Mary Queen of Scots, to the Earl of Bothwell. London, 1790. ——. The Love Letters of Mary Queen of Scots to James Earl of Bothwell with Her Love Sonnets and Marriage Contracts. Edited by Hugh Campbell. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1825. ——. Lettres Ine´dites de Marie Stuart. Edited by Alexandre Labanoff. Paris: Chez Merlin, Libraire, 1839. ——. Letters of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Documents Connected with her Personal History. Edited by Agnes Strickland. 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1842. ——. Lettres, Instructions et Me´moires de Marie Stuart, Reine d’E´cosse. Edited by Prince Alexandre Labanoff. 7 vols. London: Charles Dolman, 1844. ——. Letters of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland. Edited by William Turnbull. London: Charles Dolman, 1845. ——. Lettres de Marie Stuart. Edited by Alexandre Teulet. Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot Fre`res, 1859. ——. The Poems of Mary Queen of Scots. Edited by Julian Sharman. London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1873. ——. Queen Mary’s Book: A Collection of Poems and Essays by Mary Queen of Scots. Edited by P. Stuart-Mackenzie Arbuthnot. London: George Bell & Sons, 1907. ——. A Year Book of Mary Queen of Scots. Edited by A.A. Methven. London and Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1913. ——. The Silver Casket: Being Love-Letters and Love-Poems Attributed to Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Edited by Clifford Bax. London: Home & Van Thal, 1946. ——. Bittersweet within My Heart: The Collected Poems of Mary, Queen of Scots. Edited by Robin Bell. London: Pavilion Books, 1992.

Bibliography 149 Sylvester, Joshuah. The Complete Works of Joshuah Sylvester. Edited by Alexander B. Grosart. 2 vols. Edinburgh: Chertsey Worthies’ Library, 1880. Taffin, Jean. Des Marques des Enfans de Dieu. Harlem, 1588. ——. Des Marques des Enfans de Dieu. Saumur, 1601. ——. De Merck-teeckenen der kinderen Godt. Translated by Iacobvs Viverivs. Rotterdam, 1613. Tottel, Richard. Tottel’s Miscellany. Edited by Hyder Rollins. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965. Turbervile, George. The Heroycall Epistles of . . . Publius Ovidius Naso. London, 1567. Vere, Edward de and Robert Devereux. ‘The Poems of Edward De Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford and of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex’. Studies in Philology 77 (1980): 1–132. Warnke, Frank J., trans. Three Women Poets: Renaissance and Baroque. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1987. Wither, George. Abuses Stript and Whipt. London, 1613. Wroth, Lady Mary. The Countesse of Mountgomerie’s Urania. London, 1621. ——. The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Edited by Josephine A. Roberts. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. ——. The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. Edited by Josephine Roberts. Binghamton, New York: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995. Wyatt, Thomas. Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems. Edited by R.A. Rebholz. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978.

Secondary sources Published Anonymous. Copie of a Letter Written by One in London to His Frend Concernyng the Credit of the Late Published Detection of Doyinges of the Ladie Marie of Scotland, N.p., n.d. Aasand, Hardin. ‘ ‘‘To blanch an Ethiop, and revive a corse’’: Queen Anne and The Masque of Blackness’. SEL 32 (1992): 271–285. Abel, Elizabeth, ed. Writing and Sexual Difference. Brighton: Harvester, 1982. Adams, Simon. ‘A Puritan Crusade? The Composition of the Earl of Leicester’s Expedition to the Netherlands, 1585–1586’. The Dutch in Crisis, 1585–1588: People and Politics in Leicester’s Time. Leiden: Sir Thomas Browne Institute, 1988. Allen, Percy. Anne Cecil, Elizabeth and Oxford. London: D. Archer, 1934. Altieri, Charles. ‘Rhetorics, Rhetoricity and the Sonnet as Performance’. Tennessee Studies in Literature 25 (1980): 1–23. Anderson, Amanda. Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Anderson, James. Collections Relating to the History of Mary Queen of Scotland. 4 vols. Edinburgh, 1727. Arie`s, Phillipe. Centuries of Childhood; A Social History of Family Life. Translated by Robert Baldick. London: Jonathon Cape, 1962. Armstrong, Isobel, ed. New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

150

Bibliography

Aston, Margaret. The King’s Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Attridge, Derek. ‘Puttenham’s Perplexity: Nature, Art and the Supplement in Renaissance Poetic Theory’. In Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, edited by Patricia Parker and David Quint. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Aylmer, John. An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subiectes, Agaynst the Late Blowne Blaste, Concerninge the Governme[n]t of Wemen. Strasborowe, 1559. Ballard, George. Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain. Oxford, 1752. Barash, Carol. English Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Barnett, Richard C. A Study of the Servants of William Cecil, Elizabethan Statesman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969. Barthes, Roland. Image – Music – Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977. Beilin, Elaine V. ‘ ‘‘The Onely Perfect Vertue’’: Constancy in Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’. Spenser Studies 2 (1981): 229–245. ——. Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Bell, Ilona. Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Belsey, Catherine. The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Berry, Philippa. Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Bertie, Lady Georgina. Five Generations of a Loyal House. London: Rivingtons, 1845. Bordier, Henri-Le´onard. Le Chansonnier Huguenot du XVIe Sie`cle. Paris: Libraire Tross, 1870. Bourdeille, Pierre de. Vies des Dames Illustries. 6 vols. Leyden, 1665–1666. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Edited by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Bowen, Gwynneth. ‘Sir Edward Vere and his Mother, Anne Vavasour’. Shakespearean Authorship Review 15 (1966): 4–7. Braden, Gordon. ‘Gaspara Stampa and the Gender of Petrarchism’. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38:2 (1996): 115–139. Brant, Clare, and Diane Purkiss, eds. Women, Texts and Histories, 1575–1760. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Brennan, Michael. Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992. Brydges, Samuel Egerton, ed. Restituta; or, Titles, Extracts and Characters of Old Books in English Literature Revived. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1814. Bullen, A.H., ed. Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, from Romances and Prose-Tracts of the Elizabethan Age. London: John C. Nimmo, 1890. Burgess, Robert M. Platonism in Desportes. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954. Burke, Mary E., Jane Donawerth, Linda L. Dove and Karen Nelson. Women, Writing and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britian. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000.

Bibliography 151 Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. ——. ‘Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism’. In Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. ——. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Camden, William. The Historie of the Life and Death of Mary Stuart Queene of Scotland. London, 1624. Cameron, Deborah. Feminism and Linguistic Theory. New York and London: Norton, 1980. Cameron, Keith. Louise Labe´: Renaissance Poet and Feminist. New York: Berg Publishers, 1990. Cammarata, Joan F., ed. Women in the Discourse of Early Modern Spain. Gainesville, FL: Florida University Press, 2003. Campbell, Hugh. The Love Letters of Mary Queen of Scots to James Earl of Bothwell with Her Love Sonnets and Marriage Contracts. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1824. Campbell, Lily B. Divine Poetry and Drama in Sixteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. Cave, Terence. Devotional Poetry in France c. 1570–1613. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Chalmers, George. The Life of Mary Queen of Scots; Drawn from the State Papers. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1818. ——. A Detection of the Love-Letters Lately Attributed in Hugh Campbell’s Work to Mary Queen of Scots. London: John Murray, 1825. Chambers, E.K. Sir Henry Lee: An Elizabethan Portrait. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936. Cixous, He´le`ne. ‘From the Scene of the Unconscious to the Scene of History’. In The Future of Literary Theory, edited by Ralph Cohen. New York and London: Routledge, 1989. Clarke, Danielle, ed. Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer: Renaissance Women Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000. ——. The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing. Harlow: Longman, 2001. Clarke, Danielle and Elizabeth Clarke, eds. ‘This Double Voice’: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Colie, Rosalie L. The Resources of Kind: Genre Theory in the Renaissance. Edited by Barbara K. Lewalski. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Collier, J. Payne. A Bibliographical and Critical Account of the Rarest Books in the English Language. 2 vols. London: J. Lilly, 1865. Collinson, Patrick. A Mirror of Elizabethan Puritanism: The Life and Letters of ‘Godly Master Dering.’ London: Dr William’s Trust, 1964. ——. ‘The Role of Women in the English Reformation Illustrated by the Life and Friendships of Anne Locke’. Studies in Church History 2 (1965): 258–272. ——. ‘Windows in a Woman’s Soul: Questions about the Religion of Queen Elizabeth I’. In Elizabethan Essays. London: Hambledon Press, 1994. Conaeus, Georgius. Vita Mariae Stuartae Scotiae Reginae. Rome, 1624. Cotton, Charles, ed. The Bardon Papers: A Collection of Contemporary Documents (MS Eg 2124) Relating to the Trial of Mary Queen of Scots, 1586. Ramsgate: J.T. Savage, 1907.

152

Bibliography

Cowan, Ian B., ed. The Enigma of Mary Stuart. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1971. Cowan, Samuel. Mary Queen of Scots and Who Wrote the Casket Letters? 2 vols. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1901. Crawford, Patricia. Women and Religion in England, 1500–1700. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Crew, Phyllis Mack. Calvinist Preaching and Iconoclasm in the Netherlands, 1544–1569. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Crewe, Jonathon. Hidden Designs: The Critical Profession and Renaissance Literature. London and New York: Methuen, 1986. ——. Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Dart, John. Westmonasterium; or The History and Antiquities of the Abbey Church of St Peters Westminster. 2 vols. London, 1723. Davidson, Peter. ‘New Evidence Concerning Mary Queen of Scots’. History Scotland 1 (2001): 28–34. Davis, Natalie Zemon. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987. Davison, M.H. Armstrong. The Casket Letters: A Solution to the Mystery of Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley. London: Vision Press Ltd, 1956. De Lauretis, Teresa, ed. Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1986. De Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. ——. The Resistance to Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Derrida, Jacques. Signe´ponge. Translated by Richard Rand. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Diefendorf, Barbara B. ‘The Huguenot Psalter and the Faith of French Protestants in the Sixteenth Century’. In Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800), edited by Barbara B. Diefendorf and Carla Hene. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Diggle, H.F. The Casket Letters of Mary Stuart: A Study in Fraud and Forgery. Harrogate: R. Ackrill Ltd, 1960. Doelman, James. ‘Seeking ‘‘The Fruit of Favour’’: The Dedicatory Sonnets of Henry Lok’s Ecclesiastes’. ELH 60 (1993): 1–15. Donaldson, Gordon. The First Trial of Mary, Queen of Scots. London: Batsford, 1969. ——. Mary Queen of Scots. London: English Universities Press, 1974. DuBrow, Heather. Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Dumas, Alexandre. Marie Stuart. Translated by Douglas Munro. Glasgow and London: Blackie, 1975. Duncan-Jones, Katherine. ‘ ‘‘Rosis and Lysa’’: Selections from the Poems of Sir Robert Sidney’. ELR 9 (1979): 240–263. Dunnigan, Sarah M. Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Dunnigan, Sarah M., C. Marie Harker and Evelyn S. Newman, ed. Woman and the Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Dyce, Alexander, ed. Specimens of British Poetesses. London: T. Rodd, 1825.

Bibliography 153 Essen, Leon van der. Alexandre Farne`se, Prince de Parme, Gouverner Ge´ne´ral des PaysBas (1545–1592). 3 vols. Brussells: Librairie Nationale d’Art et d’Histoire, 1933–37. Estrin, Barbara L. Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne and Marvell. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994. Ezell, Margaret J.M. The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. ——. ‘The Myth of Judith Shakespeare: Creating the Canon of Women’s Literature’. NLH 3 (1990): 578–592. ——. Writing Women’s Literary History. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Felch, Susan M. ‘ ‘‘Deir Sister’’: The Letters of John Knox to Anne Vaughan Lok’. Renaissance and Reformation 19:4 (1995): 57–68. ——. ‘ ‘‘Noble Gentlewomen Famous for Their Learning’’: The London Circle of Anne Vaughan Lock’. ANQ 16:2 (2003): 14–19. Ferguson, F.S. ‘Relations between London and Edinburgh Printers and Stationers (–1640)’. The Library. 4th ser. 8 (1927): 145–198. Ferguson, Margaret W. ‘A Room Not Their Own: Renaissance Women as Readers and Writers’. In The Comparative Perspective in Literature: Approaches to Theory and Practice, edited by Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. ——. ‘Moderation and Its Discontents: Recent Work on Renaissance Women’. Feminist Studies 20 (1994): 349–366. Ferguson, Margaret W., Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers. Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Fienberg, Nona. ‘Mary Wroth’s Poetics of the Self’. SEL 42 (2002): 121–137. Fineman, Joel. Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Flinker, Noam. The Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature: Kisses of Their Mouths. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000. Forster, Leonard. The Icy Fire: Five Studies in European Petrarchism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Edited by Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977. Fraser, Antonia. Mary Queen of Scots. London and New York: Methuen, 1969. Freccero, John. ‘The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics’. Diacritics 5 (1975): 34–40. Frye, Susan. Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Genette, Ge´rard. Figures of Literary Discourse. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982. Geyl, P. The Revolt of the Netherlands, 1555–1609. London: Williams & Norgate, 1932. Goldberg, Jonathon. James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. ——. Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

154

Bibliography

——. Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Goodall, Walter. An Examination of the Letters Said to be Written by Mary, Queen of Scots, to James, Earl of Bothwell. 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1754. Goodman, Jeffrey A. ‘Meaning in Context: Fulke Greville’s Sonnet LXXX’. ELR 16 (1986): 360–372. Gordon, Linda. ‘What’s New in Women’s History’. In A Reader in Feminist Knowledge, edited by Sneja Gunew. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Gore-Brown, Robert. Lord Bothwell. London: Collins, 1937. Gossett, Suzanne. ‘ ‘‘Man-maid, begone!’’: Women in Masques’. ELR 18 (1988): 96–113. Grafton, Anthony. Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship. London: Collins & Brown, 1990. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971. Grazia, Margreta de, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass, eds. Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Greene, Roland. Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. ——. ‘Anne Lock’s Meditation: Invention Versus Dilation and the Founding of Puritan Poetics’. In Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, edited by Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. Greene, Thomas M. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982. Griffin, Robert, ed. The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Groom, Nick, ed. Angelaki: Narratives of Forgery. 1 (1994). Grossman, Marshall, ed. Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre and the Canon. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time and Perversion: The Politics of Bodies. London and New York: Routlege, 1995. Grundy, Isobel and Susan Wiseman, eds. Women, Writing, History, 1640–1740. London: B.T. Batsford, 1992. Hackett, Helen. ‘ ‘‘Yet Tell Me Some Such Fiction’’: Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and the ‘‘Femininity’’ of Romance’. In Women, Texts and Histories, 1575–1760, edited by Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. ——. Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995. Hagerman, Anita M. ‘ ‘‘But Worth pretends’’: Discovering Jonsonian Masque in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’. Early Modern Literary Studies 6:3 (2001): 4.1–17 . Haigh, Christopher. The Reign of Elizabeth I. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984. Hall, Kim F. ‘ ‘‘I Rather Would Wish to be a Black-moor’’: Beauty, Race and Rank in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania’. In Women, ‘Race’, and Writing in the Early Modern

Bibliography 155 Period, edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. ——. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995. Hammons, Pamela S. Poetic Resistance: English Women Writers and the Early Modern Lyric. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Hannay, Margaret P., ed. Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works. Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985. ——. ‘ ‘‘Princes You as Men Must Dy’’: Genevan Advice to Monarchs in the Psalmes of Mary Sidney’. ELR 19 (1989): 22–41. ——. Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. ——. ‘ ‘‘Strengthening the Walles of . . . Ierusalem’’: Anne Vaughan Lok’s Dedication to the Countess of Warwick’. ANQ 5 (1992): 71–75. ——. ‘ ‘‘Unlock My Lipps’’: The Miserere mei Deus of Anne Vaughan Lok and Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke’. In Privileging Gender in Early Modern England, edited by Jean R. Brink. Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1993. Hanson, Elizabeth. ‘Boredom and Whoredom: Reading Renaissance Women’s Sonnet Sequences’. Yale Journal of Criticism 10:1 (1997): 178–179. Hanson, Ellis. ‘Sodomy and Kingcraft in Urania and Antony and Cleopatra’. In Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context, edited by Claude J. Summers. New York and London: Haworth Press, 1992. Harris, William O. ‘Early Elizabethan Sonnets in Sequence’. Studies in Philology 68 (1971): 451–470. Harvey, Elizabeth D. Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Harvey, Elizabeth D. and Katharine Eisaman Maus, eds. Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Haselkorn, Anne M. and Travitsky, Betty S., eds. The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon. Amherst, Mass. and London: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Hays, Mary. Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of all ages and countries. 6 vols. London: Richard Phillips, 1803. Haywood, Eliza, trans. Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots: Being the Secret History of Her Life, and the Real Causes of All Her Misfortunes. London, 1725. Heale, Elizabeth. Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse: Chronicles of the Self. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Heisch, Allison. ‘Queen Elizabeth I: Parliamentary Rhetoric and the Exercise of Power’. Signs 1 (1975): 31–55. Henderson, T.F. The Casket Letters and Mary Queen of Scots. Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1890. ——. Mary Queen of Scots, Her Environment and Tragedy. London: Hutchinson, 1905. Hendricks, Margo and Patricia Parker, eds. Women, ‘Race’, and Writing in the Early Modern Period. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

156

Bibliography

Herman, Peter C. Reading Monarch’s Writing: The Poetry of Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, and James VI/I. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002. Hicks, Leo. An Elizabethan Problem: Some Aspects of the Careers of Two ExileAdventurers. London: Burns & Oates, 1964. Hobby, Elaine. Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing, 1649–1688. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988. Hogrefe, Pearl. Women of Action in Tudor England: Nine Biographical Sketches. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1977. Hopkins, Lisa. Writing Renaissance Queens: Texts by and about Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002. Hosack, John. Mary Queen of Scots and Her Accusers. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1869. Howard, Jean E. ‘ The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies’. ELR 16 (1986): 13–43. Hudson, Winthrop S. The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1980. Hughey, Ruth, ed. The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1960. Hull, Suzanne W. Chaste, Silent & Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475–1640. San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982. Hunt, Leigh and S. Adams Lee, eds. The Book of the Sonnet. 2 vols. London: Sampson Low, Son & Marston, 1867. Hutson, Lorna. The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. ——. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Jack, R.D.S., ed. The History of Scottish Literature. 4 vols. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988. Jardine, Alice A. Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985. Jayne, Sears. Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956. Jeanneret, Michel. Poe´sie et Tradition Biblique au XVIe Sie`cle. Paris: J. Corti, 1969. Jebb, Samuel. The History of the Life and Reign of Mary Queen of Scots, and Dowager of France. London, 1725. Jed, Stephanie H. Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989. Jenkins, Elizabeth. Elizabeth the Great. London: Gollancz, 1958. John, Lisle Cecil. The Elizabethan Sonnet Sequence: Studies in Conventional Conceits. New York: Columbia University Press, 1938. Jones, Ann Rosalind. ‘Assimilation with a Difference: Renaissance Women Poets and Literary Influence’. Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 135–153. ——. The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. Jones, Norman L. Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion, 1559. London and New Jersey: Royal Historical Society, 1982.

Bibliography 157 Jordan, Constance. ‘Women’s Rule in Sixteenth-Century British Political Thought’. Renaissance Quarterly 40 (1987): 421–451. ——. Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. ——. ‘States of Blindness: Doubt, Justice and Constancy in Elizabeth I’s ‘‘Avec l’aveugler si estrange’’ ’. In Reading Monarch’s Writing: The Poetry of Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, and James VI/I, edited by Peter C. Herman. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002. Kay, Dennis. Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Kegl, Rosemary. ‘ ‘‘Those Terrible Aproches’’: Sexuality, Social Mobility, and Resisting the Courtliness of Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie’. ELR 20 (1990): 179–208. Kelly, Joan. Women, History and Theory. The Essays of Joan Kelly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Kerrigan, John. Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. King, John N. English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. King, Margaret L. Women of the Renaissance. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991. Klancher, Jon P. The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press: 1987. Knight, Deborah. ‘Women, Subjectivity, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Humanism in Feminist Film Theory’. NLH 26 (1995): 39–56. Krontiris, Tina. Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Laing, Malcolm. The History of Scotland. 4 vols. London: J. Mawman, 1804. Lamb, Mary Ellen. Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. ——. ‘Patronage and Class in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’. In Women, Writing and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain, edited by Mary E. Burke, Jane Donawerth, Linda L. Dove and Karen Nelson. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000. ——. ‘The Biopolitics of Romance in Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania’. ELR 31 (2001): 107–130. Landry, Donna and Gerald MacLean. Materialist Feminisms. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993. Lang, Andrew. The Mystery of Mary Stuart. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901. Lee, Sidney. The French Renaissance in England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910. Levin, Carole. ‘The Heart and Stomach of a King’: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Levin, Carole and Jeanie Watson, eds. Ambiguous Realities: Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987. Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. ——. ‘Anne of Denmark and the Subversions of Masquing’. Criticism 25 (1993): 341–355.

158

Bibliography

——. Writing Women in Jacobean England. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1993. Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth. Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Limm, Peter. The Dutch Revolt 1557–1648. London and New York: Longman, 1989. Linklater, Eric. Mary Queen of Scots. London: P. Davies Ltd, 1933. Love, Harold. Attributing Authorship: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Luckyj, Christina. ‘A moving Rhetorike’: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Lynch, Michael, ed. Mary Stewart: Queen in Three Kingdoms. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Translated by G. Van den Abeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. M’Arthur, Joseph D. The Ruins of Linlithgow, With Selected Notes in Vindication of the Character of Mary, Queen of Scots. Glasgow, 1798. MacCaffrey, Wallace T. Elizabeth I. London and New York: Edward Arnold, 1993. MacCarthy, B.G. Women Writers: Their Contribution to the English Novel, 1621–1744. Oxford: B.H. Blackwell Ltd, 1946. McClaren, A.N. Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth 1558–1585. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. McClure, Robert, ed. Mary Queen of Scots and the Prince her Son: Transcribed from a Contemporary Venetian Manuscript. Glasgow: Robert McClure, 1913. MacCun, Florence A. Mary Stuart. London: Methuen, 1905. Maclean, Ian. The Renaissance Notion of Woman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. McNay, Lois. Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. Main, David M., ed. A Treasury of English Sonnets. Manchester: Alexander Ireland & Co., 1880. Manley, Lawrence. Literature and Culture in Early Modern London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Marcus, Jane. Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988. Marcus, Leah S. ‘Queen Elizabeth I as Public and Private Poet: Notes toward a New Edition’. In Reading Monarch’s Writing: The Poetry of Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, and James VI/I, edited by Peter C. Herman. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002. Marks, Elaine, and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980. Marotti, Arthur F. ‘ ‘‘Love is not love’’: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and The Social Order’. ELH 49 (1982): 396–428. ——. Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Martz, Louis L. The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954. Masten, Jeffrey. Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Bibliography 159 Matchinske, Megan. Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England: Identity Formation and the Female Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. May, Steven. The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and Their Contexts. Columbia, Mo. and London: University of Missouri Press, 1991. ——. ‘The Countess of Oxford’s Sonnets: A Caveat’. ELN 29 (1992): 9–19. Meline, James F. Mary Queen of Scotts and Her Latest English Historian. New York: The Catholic Publication Society, 1871. Mignet, F.A. The History of Mary, Queen of Scots. Translated by Andrew R. Scoble. 2 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1851. Miller, Nancy, ed. The Poetics of Gender. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Miller, Naomi J. and Gary Waller, eds. Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Minta, Stephen. Petrarch and Petrarchism: The English and French Traditions. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980. Montrose, Louis Adrian. ‘Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form’. ELH 50 (1983): 415–459. ——. ‘Shaping Fantasies: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture’. In Representing the English Renaissance, edited by Stephen Greenblatt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Moody, Ellen. ‘Six Elegaic Poems, Possibly by Anne Cecil de Vere, Countess of Oxford’. ELR 19 (1989): 152–170. Moore, Mary B. Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Morin-Parsons, Kel. ‘ ‘‘Thus Crave I Mercy’’: The Preface of Anne Locke’. In Other Voices, Other Views: Expanding the Canon in English Renaissance Studies, edited by Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox and Graham Roebuck. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999. Mueller, Janel. ‘Virtue and Virtuality: Gender in the Self-Representations of Queen Elizabeth I’. In Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, edited by Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. Muir, Edwin. John Knox: Portrait of a Calvinist. London: Cape, 1929. Neale, J.E. Queen Elizabeth. London: Cape, 1934. Neely, Carol Thomas. ‘The Structure of English Renaissance Sonnet Sequences’. ELH 45 (1978): 359–389. ——. ‘Constructing the Subject: Feminist Practice and the New Renaissance Discourses’. ELR 18 (1988): 5–18. Nichols, John. The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth. 3 vols. London: John Nichols & Son, 1788–1805. Norbrook, David. Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance. London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. ——. ‘ ‘‘The Masque of Truth’’: Court Entertainments and International Protestant Politics in the Early Stuart Period’. Seventeenth Century 1 (1986): 81–110. Norbrook, David, intro. and sel., and H.R. Woudhuysen, ed. The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. North, Marcy. The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

160

Bibliography

Orgel, Stephen. The Jonsonian Masque. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. Ottenhof, John. ‘Mediating Anne Locke’s Meditation Sonnets’. In Other Voices, Other Views: Expanding the Canon in English Renaissance Studies, edited by Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox and Graham Roebuck. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999. Panizza, Letizia and Sharon Wood, eds. A History of Women’s Writing in Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Panofsky, Dora and Erwin Panofsky. Pandora’s Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol. London and New York: Pantheon Books, 1956. Park, Thomas, ed. A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England, Scotland, and Ireland: With Lists of Their Work by the Late Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford. London: J. Scott, 1806. Parker, Geoffrey. Spain and the Netherlands, 1559–1659: Ten Studies. London: Collins, 1979. Parker, Patricia. Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property. London and New York: Methuen, 1987. Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Paulissen, May Nelson. The Love Sonnets of Lady Mary Wroth: A Critical Introduction. Salzburg: Institut fu ¨ r Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1982. Peck, Linda Levy, ed. The Mental World of the Jacobean Court. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Phillips, James Emerson. Images of a Queen: Mary Stuart in Sixteenth-Century Literature. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964. Pigman, G.W. Grief and English Renaissance Elegy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pitcher, John. Samuel Daniel: The Brotherton Manuscript: A Study in Authorship. Leeds: University of Leeds School of English, 1981. Plett, Heinrich F. ‘Aesthetic Constituents in the Courtly Culture of Renaissance England’. NLH 14 (1993): 597–621. Prescott, Anne Lake. French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978. Prior, Mary, ed. Women in English Society, 1500–1800. London: Metheun, 1985. Quitslund, Jon A. ‘Spenser’s Amoretti VIII and Platonic Commentaries on Petrarch’. JWCI 36 (1973): 256–276. Rabitti, Giovanna. ‘Lyric Poetry, 1500–1650’. Translated by Abigail Brundin. In A History of Women’s Writing in Italy, edited by Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ——. ‘Vittoria Colonna as Role Model for Cinquecento Women Poets’. In Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, edited by Letizia Panizza. Oxford: Legenda, 2000. Rasmussen, Carl J. ‘ ‘‘Quietnesse of Minde’’: A Theatre for Worldlings as Protestant Poetics’. Spenser Studies 1 (1980): 3–27. Reed, Evelyn. Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk: A Portrait. London: Cape, 1962. Reid, W. Stanford. Trumpeter of God: A Biography of John Knox. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974. Richardson, W.C. Stephen Vaughan, Financial Agent of Henry VIII. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953.

Bibliography 161 Ritson, Joseph. Observations on the Three First Volumes of the History of English Poetry in a Familiar Letter to the Author. London, 1782. ——. Bibliographia Poetica: A Catalogue of English Poets, of the Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Centurys. London: G. & W. Nichol, 1802. Roberts, Josephine. ‘The Phallacies of Authorship: Reconstructing the Texts of Early Modern Women Writers’. In Attending To Early Modern Women, edited by Susan D. Amussen and Adele Seef. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998. Roche, Thomas P. Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequence. New York: AMS Press, 1989. Rody, Martyn. From Revolt to Independence: The Netherlands 1550–1650. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990. Rowton, Frederic, ed. The Female Poets of Great Britain. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1848. Rubin, Gayle. ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex’. In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. Russell, Rinaldina, ed. Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1994. Salzman, Paul., ed. An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Sa´nchez, Magdalena and Alain Saint-Sae¨ns, eds. Spanish Women in the Golden Age: Images and Realities. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Saunders, J.W. The Profession of English Letters. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964. Schleiner, Louise. Tudor and Stuart Women Writers. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994. Schmitz, Go ¨ tz. The Fall of Women in Early English Narrative Verse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Scott, Janet G. Les Sonnets E´lisabe´thains: Les Sources et L’Apport Personel. Paris: Honore´ Champion, 1929. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1985. Shanley, Mary. ‘Marriage Contract and Social Contract in Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought’. Western Political Quarterly 32 (1979): 79–91. Sharman, Julian. The Library of Mary Queen of Scots. London: Elliot Stock, 1889. Sharpe, Kevin and Peter Lake, eds. Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1994. Showalter, Elaine, ed. The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. London: Virago, 1986. Shuger, Debora Kuller. Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990. Simmonds, Edward, trans. The Genuine Letters of Mary Queen of Scots to James Earl of Bothwell. London, 1726. Siraisi, Nancy G. Mediæval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Smarr, Janet Levarie and Daria Valentini, eds. Italian Women and the City: Essays. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003.

162

Bibliography

Smith, Hilda. Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Smith, Hilda L. and Susan Cardinale, eds. Women and the Literature of the Seventeenth Century. Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press, 1990. Smith, Rosalind. ‘The Sonnets of the Countess of Oxford and Elizabeth I: Translations from Desportes’. N&Q 239 (1994): 446–450. Spence, Richard T. Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset and Montgomery (1590–1676). Stroud: Sutton Pub., 1997. Spiller, Michael R.G. The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. ——. ‘A literary ‘‘first’’: The Sonnet Sequence of Anne Locke (1560)’. Renaissance Studies 11:1 (1997): 41–55. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘Displacement and the Discourse of Woman’. In Displacement: Derrida and After, edited by Mark Krupnick. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1982. ——. The Post Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Steen, Sara Jayne. ‘Fashioning an Acceptable Self: Arbella Stuart’. ELR 18 (1988): 78–95. Steevens, George. ‘Letter to the Editor’. The European Magazine, and London Review ( June 1788): 389–391. Stenton, Doris May. The English Woman in History. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957. Stevenson, Jane. ‘Women, Writing and Scribal Publication in the Sixteenth Century’. English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 9 (2000): 1–32. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Familiar Studies of Men and Books. Vol. 27, The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. London: William Heinemann, 1923–27. Stortoni, Laura Anna, ed. Women Poets of the Italian Renaissance: Courtly Ladies and Courtesans. Translated by Laura Anna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie. New York: Italica Press, 1997. Strickland, Agnes. Life of Mary Queen of Scots. 2 vols. London: George Bell & Sons, 1873. Strong, Roy. Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1987. Summit, Jennifer. ‘ ‘‘The Arte of a Ladies Penne’’: Elizabeth I and the Poetics of Queenship’. ELR 26 (1996): 395–422. ——. Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Teague, Francis. ‘Queen Elizabeth in Her Speeches’. In Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, edited by S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davis. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992. Thompson, John Lee. John Calvin and the Daughters of Sarah: Women in Regular and Exceptional Roles in the Exegesis of Calvin, His Predecessors, and His Contemporaries. Geneva and Paris: Librairie Droz, 1992. Todd, Janet. Sensibility: An Introduction. London and New York: Methuen, 1986. Tomlinson, Howard, ed. Before the English Civil War: Essays on Early Stuart Politics and Government. London: Macmillan, 1983. Travitsky, Betty S. The Paradise of Women: Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981.

Bibliography 163 Travitsky, Betty S. and Adele F. Seeff, eds. Attending to Women in Early Modern England. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994. Trill, Suzanne. ‘ ‘‘Speaking to God in his Phrase and Word’’: Women’s Use of the Psalms in Early Modern England’. In The Nature of Religious Language: A Colloquium, edited by Stanley E. Porter. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996. Turner, Cheryl. Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Tuve, Rosemond. Essays by Rosemond Tuve: Spenser, Herbert, Milton. Edited by Thomas P. Roche. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. Veeser, H.Aram, ed. The New Historicism. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Vicente, Marta V. and Luis R. Corteguera, eds. Women, Texts and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Vickers, Nancy. ‘Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme’. Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265–279. Villius, Hans. ‘The Casket Letters: A Famous Case Reopened’. The Historical Journal 28 (1985): 517–534. Walker, Julia M., ed. Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998. Walker, Kim. Women Writers of the English Renaissance. New York: Twayne, 1996. Wall, Wendy. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Waller, Gary. English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century. 2nd Edition. London and New York: Longman, 1993. ——. The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of Gender. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. Wallwork, Jo and Paul Salzman, eds. Women Writing 1550–1750. Melbourne: Meridian, 2001. Ward, B.M. The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford: 1550–1604. London: John Murray, 1928. Warhol, Robyn R. and Diane Price Herndl, eds. Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Warnicke, Retha M. Women of the English Renaissance and Reformation. Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press, 1983. Warton, Thomas. The History of English Poetry. 4 vols. London, 1774–81. White, Micheline. ‘Renaissance Englishwomen and Religious Translation: The Case of Anne Lock’s Of the Markes of the Children of God (1590)’. ELR 29 (1999): 375–400. Wilcox, Helen. ‘Curious Frame: The Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric as Genre’. In New Perspectives on the Seventeenth-Century English Religious Lyric, edited by John R. Roberts. Columbia and London: Columbia University Press, 1994. Willcocks, M.P. Mary Queen of Scots. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1939. Williams, Franklin B. Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses in English Books before 1641. London: Bibliographical Society, 1962. Williams, Jane. The Literary Women of England. London: Saunders, Otley & Co., 1861. Wilson, Thomas. Vita et Obitus, Duorum Fratrem Suffolciensium, Henrici et Caroli Brandoni. London, 1551. Woodbridge, Linda. Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984.

164

Bibliography

Woods, Susanne. ‘The Body Penitent: A 1560 Calvinist Sonnet Sequence’. ANQ 5 (1992): 137–140. ——. ‘Anne Lock and Aemilia Lanyer: A Tradition of Protestant Women Speaking’. In Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, edited by Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945. Worden, Blair. ‘Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution’. In History & Imagination: Essays in honour of H.R. Trevor-Roper, edited by Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1981. Wormald, Jenny. Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure. London: Collins & Brown, 1991. Wynne-Davies, Marion, sel. and ed. Women Poets of the Renaissance. London: J.M. Dent, 1998. Yates, Frances. Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. Zandvoort, Reinard Willem. Sidney’s Arcadia: A Comparison Between the Two Versions. Amsterdam: N.V. Swets & Zeitlinger, 1929. Zim, Rivkah. English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer 1535–1601. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Unpublished Adams, Simon. ‘The Protestant Cause: Religious Alliance with the West European Calvinist Communities as a Political Issue in England, 1585–1630’. Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 1972. Clarke, Danielle. ‘Translation, Interpretation and Gender: Women’s Writing c. 1595–1644’. Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 1994. O’Callaghan, Michelle Frances. ‘Three Jacobean Spenserians: William Browne, George Wither, and Christopher Brooke’. Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 1993. Witten-Hannah, Margaret Anne. ’Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania: The Work and the Tradition’. Ph.D. diss., University of Auckland, 1978.

Index Aasand, Hardin 103 agency, see women’s writing Aletheia 106 anachronism 36 Andreini, Isabella 3 Anne of Denmark 103, 114–16 anonymity 11, 26 attribution disclaimers 16–17 and generic formation 7–8, 11–12, 120 uncertain 6, 11, 60–1 and women’s writing 15, 25–6, 120 see also individual entries for de Vere, Anne Cecil; Lock, Anne; Stuart, Mary authorship Renaissance writing practices 11 see also attribution Barthes, Roland 25 Bartholo Silva 20, 31 Battiferri, Laura 3 Beilin, Elaine 89, 94, 95 Bembo, Cardinal Pietro 4 Berkeley, Elizabeth Carey 54, 70 Berry, Philippa 45 Bordier, Henri-Le´onard 24 Bothwell, see under Hepburn, James, Earl of Bothwell Bradner, Leicester 65 Brandon, Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk 17, 28, 30 dedicatory epistle to 21, 26–7, 30 Brightman, Thomas 106 Brinkelow, Henry The Complaynt of Roderyck Mors 14 The Lamentacyon of a Christen agaynst the Cytye of London 14 Brinkelow, Margery 14 Brooke, Christopher 99 Brooke, John 77 Browne, William 99, 106, 117

Buchanan, George 44 Ane Detectiovn 2, 9, 41 Buckingham, Duke of 89, 90–2, 114 Bulbecke, Lord 82–6 Burckhardt, Jakob 12 Butler, Judith 43, 120 Calliope 65 Calvin, John 27, 33–4 sermons on Isaiah 38 15, 21–2, 29 Calvinism 9, 14, 30, 33 Carleton, Dudley 90, 91, 115 casket materials 41–2, 59 Catholicism and Anne of Denmark 115–16 and devotional sonnets 56–60 Cecil, Mildred 31, 64 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley 27–8, 44, 64, 74, 79–81 Cereta, Laura 3 Chamberlain, John 90, 91 Chapman, George 100, 117 Clarke, Danielle 50, 110 Clifford, Lady Anne 115 Colie, Rosalie 12 colloquy 58 Colonna, Vittoria 2–3 complaint 9, 10, 43, 46, 49–50, 55, 59–60, 72–3, 95, 104, 107 against the times 113, 117 female 50–1 gender hierarchies of 112 popular Tudor 50–2, 53 see also Wroth, Lady Mary, Lindamira’s Complaint Cooke sisters 20, 31, 64 see also individual entries cortegiana honorate 3 Council of Trent 2 Countess of Warwick 18 Daniel, Samuel 99, 117 D’Aragona, Tullia 3

165

166

Index

Darnley, Lord Henry 40 Davies, John 99 Daye, John 41 de Cosse´, Diane 69 de Lalaing, Christine 69, 73, 75 de Le´vy, Jacques 67, 68 de Maugiron, Franc¸ois Louis 66, 67, 83 de’ Medici, Lucrezia Tornabuoni 3 de Melun, Pierre 75 de Navarre, Marguerite 4 de Pisan, Christine 4 de Vere, Anne Cecil attribution problems associated with 61–5 estrangement from Oxford 79–82 Pandora sonnets 2, 9, 61–87 de Vere, Edward, Earl of Oxford 64–5, 77, 79–82 de Vere, Elizabeth 79–80 del Chiavallo, Livia 3 della Genga, Leonora 3 Deloney, Thomas 27 Denny, Edward 88–92 Dering, Edward 14, 31 Derrida, Jacques 110 Desportes, Philippe Cartels et Masquarades, E´pitaphes 65–70, 82–4 Les Amours de Diane 71 des Roches, Catherine 4 des Roches, Madeleine 4 di Guglielmo, Ortensia 3 di Morra, Isabella 3 disclaimer Meditation sonnets 15–18 Donne, John 100 Drayton, Michael 99, 100 Drue, Thomas 27 DuBrow, Heather 5–6, 95 du Guillet, Pernette 4, 5, 52 Dunnigan, Sarah 40, 52–3 elegies 9, 64, 82–6 child loss poetry 83 and complaint 109 Elizabeth I admonitory instruction of 14, 27–31, 32, 36–8, 73–6 and Anne de Vere 80, 82

casket sonnets 9, 10 and chastity 45 ‘The dowbt off future foes’ 45–6 A Godly Meditation of the Soul 17, 27, 36–8 and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus 95–6 Pandora sonnet 9, 62–3, 65, 77–9 poetics of queenship 39–40, 43, 48, 75 policies towards the Netherlands 77–9 religious alliances of 27–8 epitaphs 64–5 E´stienne, Franc¸oise 15, 29 Estrin, Barbara 6 Ezell, Margaret 40 Fane, Lady Elizabeth 17 Farne`se, Alexandre 75 Fedele, Cassandra 3 female complaint, see under complaint female voice and female authorship 16, 26, 61 and female writing 16, 61 Fenton, Sir Geoffrey 77 Fielding, Sir William, Earl of Denbigh 92 Fienberg, Nona 63, 70 Fitzroy, Mary 26–7 Fleming, Abraham 77 Fletcher, Giles 99 Fletcher, Phineas 99 forgery 42, 54 Foucault, Michel 25 Foxe, John 27 Gamage, Barbara 109 Gambara, Veronica 2–3 Genevan exiles 13, 15 genres 12 combination of 50, 52–4, 55, 59, 69, 87, 116–18, 119 and gender 4–6, 60 see also individual entries for complaint; elegies; penitential meditation; psalm paraphrase; sonnet sequences; women’s writing

Index 167 Gonzaga, Giulia 3 Googe, Barnabe 16 Gorges, Arthur 71 Greene, Roland 17, 18, 31–2, 36 Greville, Fulke 74, 99, 102 Grimald, Nicholas 16 Grismand, John 100 Grosz, Elizabeth 25 gynocriticism 4, 11, 62–3, 120–1 Hall, Kim 104 Hammons, Pamela 83 Hannay, Margaret 97 Harington, Lucy 99 Harington, Sir John 26 Harrison, John 106 Hartwell, Abraham 29 Harvey, Gabriel 41, 74 Hepburn, James, Earl of Bothwell 40–1 Herbert, Susan, Countess of Montgomery 99, 100 Herbert, William 110, 111, 113 Herman, Peter 40 Hezekiah 21–2, 28–30, 36–8 historia 73 Hoby, Elizabeth 31 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey 2, 23–4, 31–2 humanism in France 4 in Italy 3 Hume, Anna 54 Hutson, Lorna 50–1 iconoclasm 28–9 James I/VI 42, 91, 92, 99, 103, 114 Jerusalem 116 Jones, Anne Rosalind 5 Kegl, Rosemary 75 Kerrigan, John 49, 112 King, John 23 Knox, John 15, 16 as author of Meditation sonnets 18 First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women 29, 47

Labe´, Louise 4, 5, 52 Lamb, Mary Ellen 110, 115 Lanyer, Aemilia 115 Leicester, Earl of 31, 74, 77–8 Lekprevik, Robert 41 Leslie, John, Bishop of Ross 41 Piae Afflicti Animi Consolationes 55 Lewalski, Barbara 89, 114 Lewis, Jayne E. 41 liberal feminism 5 Lillie, Mary Prentice 2 Lock, Anne 2, 6, 121 attribution problems associated with 15–26 Des Marques des Enfans de Dieu 18–19 familial background 14 A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner 9, 10, 13–38 The necessitie and benefite of Affliction 19–20 Lock, Henry 14, 15 Luckyj, Christine 94 Lyon 4 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois 12 McCarthy, Bridget 90 McLaren, Anne 44 Malatesta, Battista 3 Malipiera, Olimpia 3 Manley, Lawrence 50 Manners, Sir George 91 Marot, Cle´ment 24, 37 Marotti, Arthur 5 Marriott, John 100 Masque of Blackness 96, 103–4, 115 Masten, Jeffrey 89, 94, 109 Masters, Richard 80 Mathewes, Augustine 100 Matraini, Chiara 3 May, Steven 62–3, 65, 72, 82 Melville, Elizabeth, Lady Culross 54–5 mimed female discourse 10 Montrose, Louis 105 Moody, Ellen 61–2, 70, 90 Moore, Mary B. 94

168

Index

Neoplatonism 5, 35 new historicism 5 Newton, Robert 100 Nogarola, Ginevra 3 Nogarola, Isotta 3 Norbrook, David 99 Norfolk, Duke of 41 North, Marcy 15–16, 26 Ovid Heroides 50, 52, 53 Pandora 65 Parr, Catherine 13, 17, 26, 73 patronage 30 Paulissen, May 90 penitential meditation 9, 32–5, 46, 73 Perotti, Giustina Levi 3 Petrarchism and complaint 48–54 and Elizabeth I 23, 40, 54 gender encodings 4–6, 31, 49, 92–5, 121 in Italy 3–4 and poetic competition 35 and Protestantism 9–10, 33–4 Phillips, J.E. 44 phoenix 97–9, 106, 108 plagiarism 71 Ple´iade 70, 71–2, 74 Prescott, Anne 74 prosopopoeia 9, 36, 62–3, 65, 72, 79–87 Protestantism 6, 9 and propaganda 9, 44–5, 47–8, 87, 121 Sidneian 97–9, 100, 102, 108–9, 116–17 and vernacular Continental poetics 33–4 and women’s writing 10 Prowse, Richard 14 psalm meditation 10 psalm paraphrase 13, 22–3, 32, 116 Pulci, Antonia Gianotti 3 Puttenham, George the Arte of Englishe Poetry 45–6, 70–1, 74–9 and John Soowthern 74–6, 78 Partheniades 79

Quilligan, Maureen 89 Raguenier, Denis 15 Ralegh, Sir Walter 100 Rasmussen, Carl 33 Reid-Baxter, Jamie 54–5 Roberts, Josephine 10, 88–92, 119 Rogers, Daniel 74 roman a` clef 88, 90–1, 112, 114 Ronsard, Pierre 55, 64, 71, 74 Russell, Elizabeth Hoby 64 Russell, Rinaldina 2 Sanford, James 20 Schleiner, Louise 62–3, 70 Scott, Janet 71 Seymour, Anne, Duchess of Somerset 26–7 Sharpe, Kevin 46 Shaxton, John 65 Sidney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke 54, 89, 92, 97–9, 100, 108, 116–17 Sidney, Robert 102, 109 Sidney, Sir Philip 16, 74, 97, 99, 100, 116 signature 11, 110, 119, 120 Solomon 104 Song of Songs 10, 104 sonnet sequences Anglo-Genevan tradition 24, 122 by Continental women 2–3, 12, 24, 52, 95 English female-authored tradition 7, 8, 11–12, 43 English male-authored tradition 2, 64, 104 gender encodings 4–6, 8, 31, 49 Soowthern, John 76–8 and Elizabeth I 75–6 Pandora 61–79 see also under de Vere, Anne Cecil Spenser, Edmund 97–8, 116–17 Spenserians 9, 96, 99–101, 102, 108–9, 116 Stampa, Gaspara 2–3, 52 Steevens, George 62, 65, 76 stigma of print 16–17 Stortoni, Laura Anna 2

Index 169 Strozzi, Alessandra Macinghi 3 Stuart, Mary attribution problems associated with 41–3 casket sonnets 2, 8, 9, 40–55, 121 devotional sonnets 55–60 and Elizabeth I 39–40, 44–6 embroidery 39–40 poetics of piety 57 subjectivity 5, 34, 58–9, 93–6, 118 Summit, Jennifer 26, 39–40, 46, 55 Sylvester, Joshua 99, 100 Tacitism 102 Taffin, John Of the Markes of the Children of God 14, 20 see also Lock, Anne, Des Marques des Enfans de Dieu Terracina, Laura Bacio 3 Tottel, Richard 16 Tottel’s Miscellany 17, 23–4, 31–2, 52 Trill, Suzanne 33 Tudor, Mary 26–7 Turberville, George 50 Udall, Nicholas 29 Urania 98 Vaughan, Stephen 14 Vavasour, Anne 81 Walker, Kim 63, 70, 89, 94 Wall, Wendy 17, 89, 93, 94

Waller, Gary 89, 93–4 Walsingham, Francis 57, 81 Ward, B.M. 80 Warwick, Countess of 14 Watson, Thomas Hekatompathia 64, 71 Whitney, Isabella The Copy of a Letter 10, 49, 50–1 A Sweet Nosgay 10, 49 Wither, George 99–100 women’s writing and attribution 11–12, 15–16, 25, 41–3, 60–1 and literary history 118, 119 and methodology 7, 43 and politics 26, 31, 38, 40, 101–2, 119–22 and religion 10, 120 and secular lyric agency 5, 7, 11–12, 43, 49–50, 61, 118, 119 separated from men’s writing 14, 120 and suppression 90–2 Woolf, Virginia 1, 7 Wormald, Jenny 42 Wroth, Lady Mary Lindamira’s Complaint 9, 10, 88, 109–18 Pamphilia to Amphilanthus 9, 88–109, 118, 120 as Spenserian patron 99–100 Urania 2, 49, 88–92, 95, 100–1 Wyatt, Sir Thomas 2, 13, 23–4 paraphrase of Psalm 51 32–5, 37–8 Wynne-Davies, Marion 63, 64, 70, 72