Writing Women and Reading the Renaissance

Renaissance Society of America

Writing Women and Reading the RenaissanceAuthor(s): Barbara Kiefer LewalskiSource: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), pp. 792-821Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society ofAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2862488Accessed: 15/10/2009 09:38

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Writing Women and Reading the Renaissance*

by BARBARA KIEFER LEWALSKI

IF THERE IS ANYTHING that scholars in the Renaissance and scholars of the Renaissance (of whatever ideological persuasion) might be

expected to share, it is delight in the recovery of texts worthy of attention as aesthetic objects and/or as significant documents for interpreting the period. Arguably such new texts-and especially texts and artworks by women-will constitute the most enduring element in our ongoing reconstruction of the Renaissance. Thanks to a decade or so of feminist and cultural studies focussed on gender and the social construction of identity, we now know a good deal about how early modern society constructed women within several discourses-law, medicine, theology, courtiership, domestic advice.I We also know a good deal about how major poets and dramatists-Petrarch, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton-dealt with issues of gender and the representation of women in complex literary texts.2 But because we have only begun the recovery and analysis of elusive women's texts, many of them unpublished, uncer- tain of attribution, and in obscure archives, we still know very little about how early modern women read and wrote themselves and their world.3 And the few texts we have were virtually unknown before the present decade.

Yet in this area the unfortunate Balkanization of our field is at its most divisive. There are comparatively few workers in this particular vineyard (for the English scene some distinguished names include Margaret Ezell, Josephine Roberts, Margaret Hannay,

*This essay is a version of theJosephine Waters Bennett Lecture delivered at the Na- tional Conference of the Renaissance Society of America in Durham, NC, in spring, I99I.

'See, e.g., Kelly-Gadol, 137-64; [Woodbridge] Fitz, I980, 1-22; Maclean; Laqueur; Amussen; Ferguson, Quilligan, and Vickers.

2See, e.g., Marotti, 1982, 396-428; Montrose, 1983, 61-94; Parker and Quint; Du- brow and Strier; Belsey; Greenblatt, 1988, 66-93; Jardine; Marotti, 1986; Nyquist and Ferguson.

3Some major collections of essays on early modern Englishwomen are edited by: Rose; Prior; Hannay, 1985; Labalme; Haselkorn and Travitsky; Levin and Watson. Some overviews include: Beilin; Warnke. There are also anthologies edited by Moira Ferguson, Germaine Greer, Betty Travitsky, Mary R. Mahl and Helene Koon, and Angeline Goreau.

[792 ]

WRITING WOMEN AND READING THE RENAISSANCE 793

Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan). But work by these and other scholars on women's texts often receives little attention either from the grand old scholars of Renaissance man, or from the newer scholars of early modern ideology and culture, with their focus on class, race, gender, and power relations. To be sure, there are plenty of conferences and conference sessions about women in the Renais- sance but their audiences are often skewed: a recent major conference at the University of Maryland had well over two hundred in attendance but less than a dozen men. One consequence of this Bal- kanization is that the newly important women's texts are often too narrowly contextualized in literary and historical terms-a pity since they come before us bare and unaccommodated, without the accretion of scholarship and critical opinion through the ages that so largely determines how we understand and value literary works. Another is that early modern women's voices, perspectives, and writings are not adequately brought to bear upon topics which have become central for literary scholars-the power of social and cultural institutions, the ideology of absolutism and patriarchy, the formation of subjectivity, the forms of authorial "self-fashioning," the possibility and manifestations of resistance and subversion. It remains the case, as Carol Neely has noted, that the new Foucault- ian Renaissance world picture we now often work with tends to be as monolithic as the old one: hierarchical, patriarchal, absolutist, unsubvertable.4

My argument and examples today are drawn from a book I am now completing,5 focussed on women whose active involvement with the culture of Jacobean England can be read through some extant texts of their own making. Here I will be discussing very briefly the personal letters and coterie poetry of the countess of Bed- ford; the family histories and diary of Lady Anne Clifford; the pro- tofeminist polemic and autobiographical dream-vision poetry of Rachel Speght; the Senecan tragedy and Tacitean history of Eliz- abeth Cary, Lady Falkland; the patronage poems, passion poem, and country-house poem of Aemilia Lanyer; and at somewhat greater length, the massive romance, Petrarchan lyric sequence, and pastoral drama of Lady Mary Wroth. Most of these women were interrelated within the kinship or patronage bonds of aristo-

4Neely, 5-18. For a related critique, see Boose, 707-42; and Howard, 1986, 13-43. SLewalski, I9922, forthcoming.

RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

cratic families. Their lives and their texts illuminate and contextu- alize each other, allowing us to perceive some common patterns.

Why the Jacobean era? Received wisdom has it that this era was a regressive period for women, as a culture dominated by a powerful queen gave way to a court ethos shaped by the patriarchal ideology and homosexuality of James I.6 Education for Jacobean women is said to have declined, especially by comparison with the humanist classical education some Tudor women enjoyed.7 And beyond question the period saw an outpouring of repressive or overtly misogynist sermons, tracts, and plays, detailing women's physical and mental defects, spiritual evils, rebelliousness, shrew- ishness, and natural inferiority to men in the hierarchy of being. Yet whereas Elizabethan women writers produced few original texts, being occupied chiefly with translation, several Jacobean women produced and published original poems, drama, and prose of some scope and merit, while others wrote themselves and their experiences through letters, memoirs, and other forms of cultural expres- sion. In the Jacobean era we first begin to hear Englishwomen's own voices in some numbers-a breakthrough to female authorship that came to England rather later than to France, Italy, and Spain, where the sixteenth century saw the emergence of such notable women writers as Marguerite of Navarre, Louis Labe, Veron- ica Franco, Vittoria Colonna, and others.

Jacobean women writers did not of course float free of the repressive ideology and patriarchal institutions that structureJacobean society. But I want to urge the importance of the textual gestures through which they claimed an authorial identity and manifested their resistance while embedded within that society.8 One useful theoretical model for such resistance is provided by Gramsci's analysis of how a dominant ideology may be contested by subaltern or marginal groups.9 And an illuminating perspective on such resistance is suggested by the recent political uprisings all over eastern Europe, testifying to the fact that inner resistance and critical consciousness can develop even while ideological conformity is being rigorously enforced. Jacobean women did not see themselves as a cohesive group defined by gender, and those I mean to discuss are

60n the Jacobean patriarchal ethos, see Goldberg and Schochet. 7See, e.g., Reynolds, 23-37; Henderson and McManus, 82-98; Gardiner; Brink. 8Davis, I986, 53-63, emphasizes the emergence of the sense of self as a member of

a group, especially the family. See also Davis, 1978, I47-90. 9Gramsci, Q 25.

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hardly representative of women in other or even the same ranks of society: four are noblewomen, and two are gentlewomen with court or city connections. Yet several of them (Lanyer, Speght, Clifford, Wroth) register some consciousness of common gender interests; Lanyer and Speght also claim to formulate the wrongs and complaints of many women. They are in any case the most artic- ulate female voices of the era, women who found often impressive literary means to contest the place assigned them in Jacobean patriarchal culture, resisting its usual construct of women as chaste, silent, and obedient. o They rewrite discourses which repress or diminish women-patriarchy, gender hierarchy, Petrarchanism, Pauline marriage theory, and more-by redefining or extending their terms, or infusing them with new meaning: it is the way any orthodoxy is first opened to revisionism.

What factors, we might first ask, helped to empower them? For one thing, a larger space for cultural activity was opened to aristocratic women when Queen Elizabeth's death removed her cultural dominance from the scene while leaving in place a powerful female example. For another, some counterweight to patriarchy was provided by female communities-mothers and daughters, ex- tended kinship networks, close female friends, the female entourage of Queen Anne. For yet another, most of these women had a reasonably good education (modern languages, history, literature, religion, music, occasionally Latin) and some apparently found in romances and histories more expansive terms for imagining women's lives. Also, the status and reputation of the important Elizabethan patroness-poet, the countess of Pembroke, provided a model and sanction for the literary activities of a new generation of women, as Lanyer and Wroth explicitly recognized.

At another level, while Jacobean patriarchy and absolutism were very powerful as ideology, that power was often undermined in practice by conflicting demands and loyalties. In theory-King James's theory articulated in The Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies and the Basilikon DoranII-the absolute power of God the supreme patriarch is imaged in the absolute monarch of the state, and in the husband and father of a family. A woman's subjection, first to her father and then to her husband, imaged the subjection of all English

I°See, e.g., Hull's very useful survey of books directed to a female audience in the period, titled in terms of that ideal, Chaste, Silent and Obedient.

"James I, 1598 and I603.


people to their monarch and of all Christians to God. But in practice, a woman might (and these women all did) find some competition among the several authorities claiming her duty-her own family, her husband, her king, her religion-as well as conflicts between her own desire and obedience to all of these. This sets up, as Karl Weintraub phrases it, a destabilizing competition among compelling cultural forms;12 when the patriarchs do not line up neatly in support of each other, women must choose, and their struggles to do so may serve as a catalyst for self-definition, resistance, and writing.

Also, Christian and especially Protestant orthodoxy held a po- tential for destabilization in its insistence on every Christian's im- mediate relationship with God and primary responsibility to follow conscience. While there is plenty of support in the Pauline epistles and elsewhere in the Bible for patriarchy and a wife's subjection to her husband, some texts (e.g., Galatians 3:28) inscribe a very dif- ferent politics: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." Such texts anchor arguments for women's spiritual equality which Speght and Lanyer develop to undermine the cultural presumption of women's natural inferiority and necessary subjection to men. These women confidently claimed the support of God the supreme patriarch (much as Foxe's female martyrs had done) against the various earthly patriarchs who claimed to stand toward them in his stead.

Another enabling factor may be the amazing variety of female images in literature and especially on the stage: clever and resource- ful widows like Middleton's Valeria; ambitious plotters who dom- inate their husbands like Lady Macbeth; roaring girls like Moll Cutpurse; cross-dressed heroines like Rosalind andJessica; learned princesses skilled in legal and rhetorical argument like Shakespeare's Portia or Sidney's Pamela; lady knights whose swords were mighty in the pursuit of adventure and love like Spenser's Britomart or Ariosto's Bradamante or Tasso's Clorinda; militant queens like Fletcher's Bonduca (Boadicea) and Heywood's Amazon Penthesilea; shrews, often enough justified, lively city wives and shopkeepers, vigorous tavern keepers, whores honest and dishonest, courtesan-heroines like Webster's Vittoria Corom-

I2Weintraub, 841-42.

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bona. If such texts are read against marriage sermons and domestic conduct literature, and with Foucaultian assumptions about the ir- resistible power of ideology, it is easy enough to produce the familiar argument that all the subversive images of female power, wit, and rebellion are finally contained by the catastrophes in the tragedies or the marriage finales in the comedies, and that patriarchal power is indeed reinforced by allowing and then controlling such gestures. But if we admit the power of literary and dramatic images to affect the imagination, we might expect the very presence of such a galaxy of vigorous and rebellious female characters to undermine any monolithic social construct of women's nature and role.'3 There is some evidence that women took the oppositional support they needed or wanted from plays and books. The queen herself was a passionate playgoer who supported and attended satirical plays; the French ambassador claimed that she did so "in order to enjoy the laugh against her husband."I4 And the diarist and biographer Lady Anne Clifford claimed, echoing Spenser, that she found empowerment through the infusion of Chaucer's spirit: "if I hade nott exelent Chacor's booke heare to comfortt mee I wer in a pitifull case, having so manny trubles as I have butt when I rede in thatt . . . a little part of his beauteous sperett infusses ittselfe in mee. " s

There is also the gap or slippage between ideology and common experience. Englishwomen throughout the seventeenth century exercised a good deal of actual power: as managers of estates in their husbands' absences at court or on military and diplomatic missions; as widows managing their own estates and those of their minor children or wards; as members of guilds; as wives and mothers who sometimes dominated their men by sheer force of personality or outright defiance.I6 Also, the anxious denunciations of female cross-dressing by king, clergy, and pamphleteers around 1620

'3The subversive impact of the drama is explored in Woodbridge, I986, 244-68; Shepherd, 67-218.

'4Rpt. in Chambers, I, 325. Some overview of women's reading in the period is provided in Spufford. Women's presence in the audience at the public as well as the private theaters (aristocrats and citizens' wives) is documented in Gurr's extensive study.

IS"To the Countess Dowager of Kent," British Library ADD MS 15,232. Cf. Faerie Queene 4.34.6-7, "Through infusion sweete / Of thine own spirit, which doth in me survive / I follow here the footing of thy feete."

'6See, e.g., Ezell; Clark; Davis, 1979.


make the claim (however exaggerated) that not only lower-class or underworld figures like the notorious Long Meg of Westminster and Moll Frith, but also noblewomen and citizens' wives were af- fecting doublets, swords, broad-brimmed hats, and short hair.I7 This was read as a challenge to gender hierarchy-and the gesture could indeed insinuate that clothes and custom (not intrinsic nature) make the man or woman, and could imply that women might assume masculine roles and privileges as easily as doublet and sword.

Finally, there is the example of resistance at the top, by all the women in the family of the king-patriarch. The queen, marginal- ized by James's ideology of rule and his homosexual favorites, de- veloped an oppositional role manifested in her separate court, entourage, and patronage, her Roman Catholic proclivities and intrigues, her blatant pro-Spanish politics that continually embar- rassedJames, and especially in the court masques that she commis- sioned, produced, helped create, and performed in. Personating blackfaced Africans and militant queens, Anne of Denmark and her ladies subverted the expected representation of the king as the ra- diating source of all goods by displaying themselves as agents of primitive energy, power, virtue, and transformation. The king's daughter Elizabeth as Electress Palatine and later as the ill-fated queen of Bohemia assumed the mantle of her dead brother Prince Henry to become a galvanizing symbol for international Protes- tantism in the Thirty Years' War, and the catalyst for opposition in England to James's pacific politics. The king's cousin Arbella Stuart defied James with a secret and forbidden marriage (to William Seymour) that strengthened her claim to the throne and then (in male disguise) made a boldly romantic, though unsuccess- ful, flight to France with him. Such examples surely had a resonance in Jacobean patriarchal culture.

Now I want to look briefly at some women's texts in several genres which exhibit women's self-definition, resistance to patriarchy, and authorship. Queen Anne's favorite courtier, Lucy (Har- ington) Russell, countess of Bedford, was the major patroness of the Jacobean period and a force to be reckoned with in the dispo- sition of offices and favors; she also took on the role of coterie

'7For some discussion of actual cross-dressing in the period and its implications, see Howard, 1988, 418-40. For discussion of the cross-dressing tracts of the I62os, see

Woodbridge, 1984, 139-51.

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poet.I8 She was a consummate insider but one whose prominence and power were gained despite rather than because of her husband, through her own prominent family and her own efforts. The death of her father and only brother made her an independent heiress, while her husband's disgrace and exile from court as a participant in Essex's rebellion, together with his incapacity from a stroke, al- lowed her to enjoy the privileged status of a wealthy, titled widow without in fact being one. A possible model for Lady Haughty in BenJonson's Epicoene, the countess of Bedford lived apart from her husband and gathered a coterie of male and female wits and poets around her at Twickenham. She associated herself closely with the queen's subversive masques and Princess Elizabeth's oppositional politics, provided in her familiar letters a wryly ironic perspective on Jacobean society,I9 and was literary patron to the major and many minor poets of the age-Jonson, Donne, Daniel, Drayton, Wotton-offering them some financial assistance but chiefly her court influence and coterie association. Her circle included her friend and kinswoman Cecilia Bulstrode, the "Court Pucelle" identified by Jonson in a vitriolic epigram as a principal player in the literary "news" games involving composition of satirical or bawdy poems and essays on court society.20 The countess of Bedford had some influence on her clients' poems, most obviously on the several verse epistles and poems Donne addressed to her or exchanged for hers. We do not have the poems Donne requested from her which he termed "an excellent exercise of your wit, which speaks so well of so ill"-possibly licentious love poems? bawdy verse? topical satire? But her poetic exchange with him at the death of Cecilia Bul- strode affords some insight into the poetic transactions of her cir-

'8See Williams. Excluding royal ladies, the entry for the countess of Bedford is matched only by that for the countess of Pembroke. Some biographical information is supplied in Byard, 20-28; Lewalski, 1987, 52-77; Grimble, 165-76.

'9[Bacon] Cornwallis, 50-5 (7 March I618); 47 (22 October I617). Jane Cornwallis was the formerJane Meutys, a member of the countess' entourage at Twickenham; in 1614 she married Nathanial Bacon. She was perhaps Lucy Bedford's closest woman friend; they kept up a correspondence over several years, and thirty-three Bedford letters survive.

20Jonson, Underwood number forty-nine. For the "news game" and the composition of aphoristic essays and poems on themes of "State, Religion, Bawdrie," see Savage. For further discussion of the news game and this affair, see Evans, 75-80.


cle.21 Donne's elegy for Bulstrode begins by denying the argument of his holy sonnet "Death Be Not Proud," emphasizing for this occasion Death's overwhelming power: "Death I recant, and say, un- said by mee / What ere hath slip'd, that might diminish thee." The countess of Bedford's poem-good enough to have been ascribed to Donne in several editions of his poems-offers a correction, quoting against Donne the first line of his "Death Be Not Proud" and asserting that death cannot harm theJust, in whose number she (rather questionably) places Bulstrode. Donne replied with a more

hopeful poem, accepting her correction. Unlike her male poet- clients, the countess' effort to claim the role of witty amateur poet is hardly a move to advance her career. Evidently she found the ac-

tivity empowering and pleasant and (in her own circle at least) a means to gain a reputation for the wit and sprezzatura long expected of male courtiers.

Lady Anne Clifford's writings display the relation between writ-

ing and resistance in the genres of biography, autobiography, fam-

ily history, and the diary.22 They record her legal and domestic

struggles over several decades, as she challenged the terms of her father's will and claimed lands and titles on the basis of an ancient entail, resisting the importunity and persecution of husband, male relatives, the inheriting uncle, judicial and ecclesiastical authorities, and the king himself. Through her two marriages she was countess of Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery, but took pride in holding herself apart, living, "in both these my lords' great familys as the river of Roan or Rodamus runs through the lake of Geneva, without mingling any part of its streams with that lake; for I gave myself wholly to retiredness . . . and made good books and virtuous

2IFor discussion of the relationship of Donne and Lucy Bedford, see Marotti, I986; Maurer, 205-34; Thomson, 329-40; Lewalski, 1987. Donne's elegies for Bulstrode are in Milgate, 1978; the Countess' elegy is printed and its attribution to her in several manuscripts is discussed in Milgate, Appendix B, 235-37.

22Anne Clifford's Lives of her mother, father, uncle, and herself (British Library Harley MSS 6177) were first published by Gilson. Her annotated family records are in three large volumes called the Great Books of the Records of Skipton Castle (Cumbria Record Office, WD / Hoth / Great Books). She also directed the collection of records and eyewitness accounts of all of her father's sea voyages in an elegant manuscript (Cumbria Record Office, WD / Hoth / Additional Records no. 70). Her Jacobean Di- ary was edited by Sackville-West from an eighteenth-century copy of the lost original (cited in my text by page number).

800

WRITING WOMEN AND READING THE RENAISSANCE 8o0

thoughts my companions. "23 In all her writings she derived her true identity from her own family, as "sole Daughter and heir to my Il- lustrious Father" (George Clifford, third earl of Cumberland); her moral and spiritual strength came she thought from her mother, Margaret (Russell) Clifford, who at first masterminded the law- suits. She also claimed empowerment from her good education, her reading, and especially from God "that always helped me" in the struggles against the earthly patriarchs. After outliving them all, she came into her inheritance and governed her several estates for thirty years, relishing the combined roles of patriarch, matriarch, and sheriff of the county.

Much of Anne Clifford's writing was the by-product of gather- ing materials to support her legal claims. But herJacobean Diary- a record of her first year at court (1603) and of her most embattled years of legal and domestic struggle (I6I6-I9)-has another im- pulse: it is about the earliest English secular diary to do much with the analysis of emotions, motives, experiences, and judgments of people and events.24 One example is her account of a summons to court about her claims, at which time the queen promised to do "all the good in it she could . .. and gave me warning not to trust my matters absolutely to the king lest he should deceive me." She reports herself holding out stubbornly against the king's efforts as she recounts a highly dramatic court scene: "My Lord Buckingham . . . brought us into the King, being in the Drawing Chamber. He put out all that were there and my Lord and I kneeled by his chair sides when he persuaded us both to peace and to put the whole matter wholly into his hands, which my Lord consented to, but I beseech't His Majesty to pardon me for that I would never part with West- moreland while I lived upon any condition whatsoever. Sometimes he used fair means and sometimes foul means but I was resolved before so as nothing would move me" (48-49). Other entries record Dorset's domestic pressure to force her to accept the offered monetary settlement in lieu of the property-exiling her to the country and for a time removing her two-year-old daughter from

23Life of Me, 40. 24The only competitor I can think of is Simon Forman's autobiography and some

of his Diary entries: Bodleian, MSS Ashmole, 208, 226. Other contemporary women's journals are less personal, e.g., Hoby's Diary and theJournal of Grace (Sherrington) Mildmay-almost I,ooo manuscript pages in the Northampton public library, excerpt in Weigall, 119-38.


her: "All this time my Lord was in London where he had all and in- finite great resort coming to him. He went much abroad to Cock- ing, to Bowling Alleys, to Plays and Horse Races, and commended by all the world. I stayed in the country having many times a sor- rowful and heavy heart, and being condemned by most folks because I would not consent to the agreements, so as I may truly say, I am like an owl in the desert" (48). Clifford's diary opens up the relation between authoring a text and authoring a self.

Aemilia Lanyer - gentlewoman-in-decline, daughter and wife of court musicians, cast-off mistress of Queen Elizabeth's Lord Chan- cellor, Lord Hunsdon (to whom she bore an illegitimate child) -is the first Englishwomen to publish a substantial volume of original poems, Salve Deus RexJudaeorum (1611 ).25 Pace A. L. Rowse, there is no hard evidence to identify her as Shakespeare's Dark Lady.26 Her multiple dedications (mostly poems) address nine noblewomen, including Queen Anne, Princess Elizabeth, Arbella Stuart, the countess of Bedford, Lady Anne Clifford, and her mother Mar- garet Clifford, countess of Cumberland. Margaret Clifford is singled out as Lanyer's primary dedicatee and former mistress and credited with commissioning her country-house poem "To Cooke-ham."27 Lanyer's dedicatory poems make an overt bid for patronage much as a male poet-client might, but they rewrite the patronage system to invite female patronage for a female client, with the evident expectation that the addressees will approve her egalitarian gender-and class-politics. That expectation was no doubt mistaken on the last count, but perhaps not on the first.

25The work was apparently issued twice in I61 I, with minor changes in the imprint, and is now very rare. My citations in the text are from the Huntington Library copy of the first issue (STC 15227) with imprint in four lines.

26Rowse, I974, I978. He supplies useful biographical information about Lanier (chiefly from Forman's Diary), but the links to Shakespeare are very tenuous: the fact that Shakespeare's landlady also visited Forman, that Shakespeare's patron was Lord Hunsdon who fathered Lanier's illegitimate son, and that her dark Italian beauty, mu- sical family, literary talent, and questionable moral character fit the description of the "Dark Lady" in the sonnets.

270nly nine copies of the Salve Deus have been found; some were presentation copies. The relationship between Lanyer and Margaret Clifford is by no means clear on present evidence: presumably she did spend some time (however brief) at Cookham, leased by Lord Russell of Thornhaugh and evidently occupied by the countess of Cum- berland at some periods during her estrangement from her husband and her early wid- owhood.

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Lanyer's volume as a whole is conceived as a Book of Good Women, imagining a female community sharply distinguished from male society and its evils, that reaches from Eve to the con- temporaryJacobean patronesses, with virtue and learning descend- ing from mothers to daughters.28 The dedication "To all vertuous Ladies in generall" and the prose epistle "To the Vertuous Reader" reach beyond the named dedicatees to a general female audience. In the latter Lanyer presents herself as a hard-hitting defender of womankind against the familiar libels advanced in the centuries-old Querelle desfemmes: her biblical counterexamples illustrate not only women's natural abilities, moral goodness, and the singular honors accorded them by Christ but also argue (in the examples of Deb- orah, Jael, Judith, and Hester) their God-given call to exercise military and political power. Her long title poem, Salve Deus RexJu- daeorum, disrupts our generic expectations for a meditation on, or narrative of, Christ's Passion, using the form chiefly to contrast the good women associated with Christ's Passion (Pilate's wife, Mary, the women ofJerusalem) to the evil men. She incorporates within the poem a notable defense of Eve as (comparatively) guiltless in comparison with Adam and Pilate because she intended no evil--a dubious exegesis of Genesis by which Lanyer underscores the sus- ceptibility of the biblical narratives to interpretations driven by various interests. Making Eve and Pilate's wife representatives of womankind, while Adam and Pilate represent men, she concludes with a forthright declaration of gender equality, denouncing hierarchy and men's unjust claim to rule:

Then let us have our Libertie againe, And challendge to your selves no Sov'raigntie; You came not in the world without our paine, Make that a barre against your crueltie; Your fault being greater, why should you disdaine Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny?

If one weake woman simply did offend, This sinne of yours, hath no excuse, nor end.

To which (poore soules) we never gave consent, Witnesse thy wife (O Pilate) speakes for all. (Sig. D 2)

Lanyer's country-house poem "To Cooke-ham," which may pre- date BenJonson's "Penshurst," celebrates that estate as a lost Eden

28Lewalski, 1985, 201-24; Lewalski, i991i, 87-106.


whose female occupants (Margaret Clifford, countess of Cumber- land, her young daughter Anne, and Lanyer) have had to abandon it to desolation.29 It is Lanyer's fantasy of a classless female society, a happy garden state where the three women lived without mates but found contentment and delight in nature, God, and female companionship. Some of its topics reprise her earlier radical critique of class distinctions in her dedication to Anne Clifford:

All sprang from one woman and one man, Then how doth Gentry come to rise and fall? Or who is he that very rightly can Distinguish of his birth, or tell at all

In what meane state his Ancestors have bin, Before some one of worth did honour win. (Sig. E 4v)

Lanyer's several dedicatory poems also set forth her apologia as a woman poet. At times she invokes the humilitas topos to excuse the "defects" of her sex, yet she expects to be empowered by her subject, Christ, and all these worthy women. Appealing to (and gendering) the time-honored topos of nature over art, she derives her poetry not from classical learning (the province of scholars who "by Art do write") but from the source of all arts, "Mother" Na- ture, "WhomJoves almighty hand at first did frame, / Taking both her and hers in his protection" (Sig. Bv). She also claims the poet's eternizing power, promising Margaret Clifford that these poems will "remaine in the world many yeares longer than your Honour, or my selfe can live, to be a light unto those that come after" (Sig. Cv). The longest dedication is a dream-vision poem in which Lanyer invites the countess of Pembroke to recognize her as her successor in a female poetic line.

The London minister's daughter, Rachel Speght, is the first En- glish woman polemicist who can be securely identified. 30 Speght's signed tract, A Mouzellfor Melastomus (1617) answers an attack in 1615 on women's nature and worth by one Joseph Swetnam; it was also published by Swetnam's bookseller. Two other pseudonymous replies followed, under women's allegorical names, which

29Lanyer's poem was certainly published beforeJonson's, in 16 6. For consideration of the dating question and comparison of Lanyer's with other estate poems, see Lew- alski, I989, 26I-75.

3°We cannot be sure on present evidence whether a woman wrote the 1589 tract, Jane Anger her Protection for Women, or if so, who she is. Speght might, however, have seen the female persona as providing some precedent for herself.

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may or may not be by women. 3 Speght presents herself as a serious, intelligent, religious young woman, not yet twenty, unmar- ried, well educated in those usually male subjects, grammar, rhet- oric, logic, and Latin-a young, embattled female David venturing to "fling this stone at vaunting Goliath" (Sig. A 3-A 3v). Her dedicatory epistles reach out for protection and (perhaps) patronage to the ladies of court and city, "all vertuous Ladies Honourable or Worshipfull." But she also claims to speak for all virtuous women of every rank and class, "rich and poore, learned and unlearned," inviting all "Hevah's sex" to see themselves as an oppressed gender under misogynist attack. While her prefatory and concluding matter inveighs (often effectively) against Swetnam as illogical, un- grammatical, illiterate, and irreligious, her tract proper virtually ig- nores him. Challenging contemporary gender ideology by providing liberalizing interpretations of the scripture texts under- girding it, she offers a serious argument for the spiritual worth and equality of women, organized in terms of Aristotle's four causes. Her exegesis of the creation story in Genesis pointedly eliminates any basis for arguing women's natural and spiritual inferiority on the basis of their cold humors, imperfect bodies, or intellectual weakness: "God . .. makes their authority equall, and all creatures to be in subjection unto them both .... For as God gave man a lofty countenance, that hee might looke up toward Heaven, so did he likewise give unto women. And as the temperature of mans body is excellent, so is womans .... And (that more is) in the Im- age of God were they both created; yea and to be brief, all the parts of their bodies, both externall and internall, were correspondent and meete for each other" (Io). Also, like Lanyer, she asserts Eve's lesser moral culpability in the Fall. The Pauline texts pronouncing the man "head" of the wife she has to accept, but she explains them (with some strained ingenuity) as directing men to share their wives' onerous domestic burdens. Speght implicitly includes her own pamphlet-writing among the extra-domestic activities sanc-

31 Swetnam's tract was first published pseudonymously (for Thomas Archer) under the name Tom Tel-troth. Speght's tract, 1617, identified Swetnam. I cite from this edition. A little later, two other responses were set forth by other publishers, evidently to keep a profitable controversy going. The pseudonymous (and evidently allegorical) women's names attached to them may or may not point to female authorship: Ester Sowernam and Constantia Munda. For discussion of the entire controversy, see Wood- bridge, I986, 74-113.


tioned by her sweeping application to women of the parable of the talents: "No power externall or internall ought woman to keep idle, but to imploy it in some service of God" (12).

In 1621 she applied that parable explicitly, citing her capacity to benefit the reader as justification for publishing a poetic meditation on death, Mortalities Memorandum. 32 It is prefaced by a long and fascinating dream-vision poem allegorizing her education: her fierce desire for learning, the obstacles she encountered, her delight in the knowledge gained, and the sudden unexplained "occurrance" that ended it (probably her marriage in 1621 to the minister William Procter). In this allegory the personification of Truth delivers a vigorous, uncompromising defence of women's education in any and all subjects. Remarkably, Speght uses her new book to insist on her authorship of the earlier tract, which some had evidently attributed to her father: "Having bin toucht with the censures of [critical readers] by occasion of my mouzeling Melastomus, I am now, as by a strong motive induced (for my rights sake) to produce and di- vulge this of-spring of my indevour, to prove them further futurely who have formerly deprived me of my due, imposing my abortive upon the father of me, but not of it" (Sig. A 2v).

Whether or not Speght's father encouraged her writing, he evidently approved and may have supervised her education. She herself may have offered her tract to Swetnam's bookseller, or he may have solicited her to answer Swetnam, in order to rekindle a profitable controversy. If the latter, she either had (at age nineteen) some reputation for learning and writing in city circles, or else she was recommended by family or friends. In any case, this London daughter obviously has not internalized class or gender constraints about authorship or publishing and may even have seen herself as something of a professional, looking to earn money from writing. We know almost nothing about her later life save that the two children registered to William Procter were probably also hers.33

Elizabeth (Tanfield) Cary, Lady Falkland, is the first English- woman to write a tragedy, Mariam, in the Senecan mode, and also the first to write a full scale history, on Edward II, in the Tacitean

32Speght, 1621. My citations are to this edition. 33The parish records of St. Giles Cripplegate, at the Guildhall, London, record the

baptisms of one "Rachell daughter of William Procter Minister" on 26 February I626, and of William his son on 15 December I630. The mother's name is not given (in these records it often is not), and William could be the son of a second marriage.

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mode. A hagiographic biography by one of her daughters34 offers a fascinating if somewhat unreliable portrait of her. It emphasizes her passion for reading and learning languages (French, Italian, Latin, Hebrew, Transylvanian); her less-than-successful efforts to conform her "strong will" to the demands of her mother, her mother-in-law, and her "very absolute" husband; her frequent pregnancies and many literary works (among them another tragedy, apparently lost);35 her lifelong Roman Catholic inclinations culminating in an open profession in 1626; her consequent repudi- ation by the irate Falkland, leaving her destitute; her daring enter- prise in spiriting her younger sons away from their brother Lucius, to be educated by the Benedictines in France. Her Mariam and Ed- ward II explore issues important in theJacobean state and in her own difficult personal life: the claims of conscience, the analogy of domestic and state tyranny, the justifications for resistance to tyrants, the power of passive resistance. In both texts a queen-wife is subjected to domestic and political tyranny. Also, both employ genres often considered dangerous because they allow for the clash of ideological positions and for the sympathetic representation of resistance and rebellion.

Mariam (1613) was known to be by Cary, though the title-page assignment to "that learned, vertuous, and truly noble Ladie, E. C." registers class and gender hesitancy about the public avowal of authorship.36 It invites comparison with contemporary Senecan tragedies in the French mode, Samuel Daniel's Philotas and Fulke

34The biography, by one R. S. [Richard Simpson], is published from a manuscript in the Imperial Archives at Lille. It is usually ascribed to her daughter Anne, who be- came the Benedictine nun Sister Clementina, and was revised by her son Patrick, who erased some passages he may have found embarrassing and added a few notes and sen- tences.

3 Her other known works are a childhood translation of Abraham Ortelius' Le Mir- roir du Monde (now at the Parish Church, Burford), a late epigraph on Buckingham (BL Egerton 2725, f.6o), and the translation of Perron, I630. Other works the daughter at- tributes to her are apparently lost: translations of Seneca's epistles, a verse "Life of Tamurlane," a manual of moral precepts for her children, several hymns and poems to the Virgin, saints' lives in verse, translations of all of Perron's works and those of the Flemish Benedictine Louis de Blois, and a controversial essay answering a tract by her son Lucius (Life, 9, 13,39, 109, I 14). Both she and her tutorJohn Davies of Hereford refer to a (lost) tragedy set in Sicily and predating Mariam.

36Cary, 1613. My citations are to this edition.


Greville's Mustapha.37 Like them, Cary examines her tyrant Herod's public crimes (including the political murder of Mariam's father and brother) but reworks the genre to focus on his domestic tyranny, which includes arranging (twice) to have Mariam killed in the event of his death while at Rome. After all this she repudiates him and refuses to enter his bed, scorning "to live with him I so profoundly hate" (III.iii). Herod, besotted with her beauty and en- raged by jealousy, is made to believe, wrongly, that she is unfaithful and has plotted to kill him, and so orders her death. Mariam is

positioned among many models of wifely behavior ranging from the lascivious and murderous Salome to the very conventional Chorus, who insist that a wife owes her entire mind and body to her husband. But while Mariam recognizes her sexual power over Herod, she scorns hypocritical pretence in the interests of prudent self-preservation:

I Know I could inchaine him with a smile: And lead him captive with a gentle word,

I Scorne my looke should ever man beguile, Or other speech, then meaning to afford. (III.iii)

Mariam's fault, according to the trustworthy Sohemus, is her "un- bridled speech," and she herself admits but shows little regret over her lack of the feminine humility that would have saved her. She goes to her death proclaiming triumph over earthly tyrants and ex-

pecting an appropriate heavenly repose-not in Abraham's bosom but in Sara's lap. Cary's tragedy profoundly challenges patriarchal control within marriage as the heroine claims a wife's right to self- definition and the integrity of her own emotional life.

Cary's History of Edward II remained unpublished until I680 and has usually been attributed to her husband Henry-a clear case of gender expectation obscuring female authorship.38 The initials E. F. (for Elizabeth Falkland), not H. F., appear on both the title

37Daniel, 1605. Produced at Blackfriars by the Children of the Queen's Revels, Phi- lotas brought Daniel before the Star Chamber to answer charges that it alluded to the Essex affair. Fulke Greville's Mustapha is in several versions: MS C; the truncated published version of 1609; and MS W, the basis for the 1633 publication. For an illumi-

nating discussion of the two strains, Italian and French Senecanism, see Charlton, I, Introduction. For discussion of Senecan tragedy and Tacitean history as dangerous genres, see Tricomi, 53-79; and Tenney, 152-63.

38[Cary], 1680. The title page of this folio edition bears this ascription, "Written by E[lizabeth] F[alkland] in the year 1627, and printed verbatim from the Original." My citations are to this edition.

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page and the epistle to the reader; the claim in the epistle that the history was written in a month's time is reiterated in the same terms in her translations of Cardinal Perron;39 and there are several passages that would be inconceivable from the pen of the vehemently antipapist Falkland. The publishers assign the composition to I627-the period Cary was enduring harsh deprivations after her conversion to Rome-and her preface describes it as therapy, "to out-run those weary hours of a deep and sad Passion." She also de- fends her historiography in creating appropriate speeches and scenes to clarify motives and causes, in the manner of Thucydides, Livy, and especially Tacitus. Her history invites continued, pointed comparisons between the reigns of Edward II and James I, but is most remarkable for a portrait of Edward's queen, Isabel, that is un- paralleled elsewhere for its length, complexity, and sympathy. Cary's Isabel is intelligent and forceful, an able rhetorician, military commander, and reforming ruler whose role in the rebellion against Edward is central while her guilt (as unfaithful wife, rebel, and regicide) is minimized. Cary makes of her a tragic protagonist whose resistance, unlike Mariam's, led to open rebellion.

I want to give major attention to Lady Mary Wroth, the most prolific and self-conscious woman writer of the period. Married (incompatibly) to the king's riding forester Sir Robert Wroth, she claimed her status as author from her Sidney family heritage, as daughter of the courtier-poet Sir Robert Sidney (Lord Lisle of Penshurst) and niece of Sir Philip Sidney and of the countess of Pembroke, who may have been a model and mentor for her.40 She used that heritage transgressively to replace heroes with heroines at the center of several major genres employed by the male Sidney authors, transforming their values and gender politics and explor- ing the poetics and situation of women writers. Her three works are all firsts for an Englishwoman: a very long romance, The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, the first part published in 1621, the second part unpublished, both of them broken off in mid-

39In the Preface to Edward II, she states: "I have not herein followed the dull Char- acter of our Historians, nor amplified more than they infer, by Circumstance. I strive to please the Truth, not Time; nor fear I censure, since at the worst, 'twas but one Month mispended." In the Perron, she is the obvious source of the assertion in two com-

mendatory epistles for the time spent: "One woman, in one Month, so large a booke." 40Robert Sidney's lyric sequence Rosis and Lysa was inscribed "For the Countess of

Pembroke." For argument and evidence regarding Mary Sidney's possible influence on her niece, see Hannay, 1992.


sentence like Sidney's New Arcadia; a Petrarchan sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, appended to the published Urania; and an unpublished pastoral drama, Love's Victory.4I The Urania is in

part a roman a clef: some episodes encode Wroth's extra-marital relationship with her first cousin, William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, to whom she bore two illegitimate children;42 many evoke the am- biance of the Jacobean court with hunting kings, banquets, danc- ing, masques, the Somerset-Howard-Overbury scandal. One satiric target (Sir Edward Denny) protested so vehemently that Wroth offered to recall the work, though there is no evidence she actually did so.43 But the brouhaha may have induced her to leave her drama and part II of the Urania unpublished, for private circu- lation only.

The lyric sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus comprises 103 sonnets and songs, written earlier but revised and rearranged for publication at the end of Urania, part I.44 So placed, these poems import from the romance characterizations of the constant "all loving" Pamphilia (associated with Wroth) and the unfaithful Amphilan- thus, "lover of two" (associated with Pembroke by several puns on his name, Will). The first fifty-five poems (forty-eight sonnets numbered sequentially, arranged in groups of six, separated by songs) comprise a very regular Petrarchan sequence. As is usual in this genre, the individual poems present particular moments, emo-

41My citations to Urania I are to the 162 edition, a personal copy of which my col-

league Gwynne Evans has kindly lent to me. My citations for the poems are to Roberts' excellent edition, 1983; she will soon bring out an edition of Wroth's Urania, both the rare 1621 part I and the unpublished part II from the unique manuscript in the New-

berry Library (Case MS fY I565. W 95). My citations from part II of the Urania are to book and folio page of the Newberry MS, a typescript of which Josephine Roberts has kindly made available to me. Loves Victory was edited by Brennan from the only complete manuscript, at Penshurst.

42In Wroth, 1983, 24, Roberts cites a manuscript in the Cardiff Central Library iden-

tifying the two children, William and Catherine, and cites other evidence pertaining to their parentage.

43The Wroth-Denny letters and satirical poems exchanged in this controversy are

reprinted in Wroth, 1983, 32-35. For discussion of the Denny-Hay scandals alluded to by Wroth, see O'Connor, 150-52; Roberts, 1977; Salzman, 178-8I. Wroth wrote to Buckingham offering to recall the book but there are no records of formal procedures to do so.

44A holograph manuscript in the Folger Library (V. a. 104) contains earlier states of the Pamphilia to Amphilanthus sequence and the poems later dispersed throughout the romance, as well as a few not included in it. From allusions to her poems by contem-

poraries as early as 1613, it seems clear that some of these circulated in manuscript long before publication.

8Io


tional crises, vacillating passions over the course of a love relationship, linked in a slight narrative that begins with the awakening to love and ends with separation. Since the Petrarchan sequence had become the primary genre for analyzing a male lover's passions, fantasies, and frustrations (while also reflecting cultural and sometimes career anxieties), it is the obvious beginning point for a woman poet seeking to give voice and subjectivity to the woman lover, normally the silent object of male desire.

To do that, Wroth's sequence reaches back to the beginning of the love-sequence (Dante's Vita nuova, Petrarch's Rime (and also his Trionfi) to rewrite those originary moments.45 While such Pe- trarchan motifs as grief, care, night, despair, absence, exchange of hearts, tear-floods, eyes as suns, fire and ice, are prominent, Wroth only occasionally reverses the Petrarchan relationship to present the lady as an abject servant begging pity from a cruel and disdainful lord. Rather, the female speaker usually proclaims her subjection or slavery to Cupid, who is most often identified with the force of her own passions. Other Petrarchan and Ovidian motifs are also al- tered or eschewed so as to derive all love's potency and agency from the lady-speaker's desire and her commitment to constancy, so that the male beloved is displaced and silenced even more thoroughly than is usual with the Petrarchan lady. The awakening to love re- writes Dante's first sonnet,46 and tells of Venus and Cupid implant- ing a burning heart in Pamphilia's breast; the male beloved's eyes (though starry and gently wounding) do not inaugurate the process. There are no praises of his overpowering physical beauty or charms, no narratives of kisses or other favors received or denied, no reports of his words or actions, and very few poems addressed to him. Absent as well are the usual motifs for aggrandizing the poet-lover at the beloved's expense: no blazons for scattering his parts, no promises to eternize him through the poet's songs, no pal- inodes or renunciations of love. Wroth's rewriting of Petrarch leads her to define female subjectivity not through the beloved as object, but by direct introspection and self-analysis. The final sonnets explore absence, but the last one ends (punning on "Will") with both

4SFor discussion of the importance for Wroth of Petrarch's Triumph of Death (which the countess of Pembroke translated and in which Laura first gives voice to her desire), see Nona Fienberg, 1992. Roberts annotates her various allusions to Robert and Philip Sidney's sequences. See also Miller, 1990, 295-310.

46Fienberg, 1992.


love and loved one subjected to the lady's free choice and constancy: "Yet love I wil till I butt ashes prove."

The remaining sonnets and songs are organized in shorter sequences, lighter in tone and loosely linked by a slight narrative in which Pamphilia engages with competing conceptions of love, falls prey to jealousy, and finally attains a settled content. The Pe- trarchan motifs are less in evidence, but Cupid is everywhere, in several guises:47 the mischievous Anacreontic child, the Ovidian boy-tyrant, the powerful young monarch of Petrarch's Triumph of Love, the Neoplatonic higher Eros. In an interlinked Corona sequence of fourteen sonnets, the last two personifications are fused to present Love as an educative, transformative experience that leads not to the realm of God or the Good but to true-that is constant-earthly love. Corona number seven asserts, a la Pe- trarch, that Love enriches the lover's "witts" and talents, making her an artist; and the last poem of the entire collection looks toward the practice of a Neoplatonic poetics. Bidding not love but the Pe- trarchan love sequence farewell as the proper exercise of passion- driven "young lovers," Pamphilia expects her achieved constancy and integrity to free her from such chaotic passions to attempt higher kinds of poetry:

My muse now hapy, lay thy selfe 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. (number I03)

This "freedom" of self-chosen constancy may sound like, but is far

from, contemporary patriarchal ideology: Pamphilia (and Wroth) affirm constancy not chastity, to a lover not a husband, as a matter of choice not imposition, and as a mean to personal and artistic

growth.

47In Wroth, 1983, 45, Roberts calls attention to some of these Cupid figures.

8I2


The romance Urania also has the expected generic markers-a multitude of characters; interwoven tales; knights fighting giants, pirates, monsters, and usurping kings; Spenserian symbolic places (the Tower of Love, the Theater of Love, the Hell of Deceit) -all here revised to explore female rather than male heroism, the challenges of love rather than of war. There are not Britomarts or Bra- damantes; heroism for women from shepherdesses to queens in- volves attaining personal integrity and agency, especially in regard to love, amid the social and psychological constraints of a patriarchal society. The work projects a dark image of theJacobean world, filled with rape, incest, tortured wives, endangered children. Ar- ranged marriages are the norm, usually resulting in a triangle with the husband sometimes complaisant but often murderously jeal- ous. Love tyrannizes over everyone, male and female. Among the male heroes infidelity is ubiquitous and repeatedly termed by the women inevitable: "tis their naturall infirmitie, and cannot be helped" (3.375).

Wroth's principal heroines make and maintain their own choices in love, whether or not they can do so in marriage, supported in this by female friendships within and across the generations. Their lives and choices validate a range of female values and lives.48 Pam- philia is constant in her love for the unfaithful Amphilanthus even after both take other spouses. Urania provides a model of good change-from shepherdess to queen as she discovers her true or- igins and family, and then from an immature first love to a worthy second love. Veralinda (another shepherdess turned queen) offers an example of mutual love begun in lowly estate (with the hero cross-dressed) and ending in a marriage blessed by paternal ap- proval. In part II of the Urania male inconstancy remains a problem, but the several principals settle into reasonably happy marriages or- as with Amphilanthus, Pamphilia, and her husband-into love triangles. And their assorted children, both legitimate and natural children, are rescued from various enchantments and begin to take over from their parents the adventures of love and rule. Despite the proliferation of monsters and the supernatural in part II, Wroth's emphasis here on generational change and the problems of growing up and growing older bring this work closer to the generational novel than to the romance.

48See Miller, 1989, I21-37. For an argument that this romance validates a version of patriarchy in the trade in sisters by brothers, see Quilligan, I990, 257-80.


The heroines exercise several kinds of self-affirmation and

agency--as rulers, counsellors, lovers, scholars, storytellers, poets, seers. Most of the women are or become queens, sometimes in their own right, like Pamphilia, who was designated as heir to her uncle's

kingdom and took its name, Pamphilia. Wroth treats female rule as natural and worthy-the queens no more prone to passion and rather less prone to tyranny than the kings.49 In the role of coun- sellor, Urania wins special praise from men and women alike for her great wisdom and liberating advice. The world of part II is more

hopeful than that of part I, in large part because the now mature heroines are more active as rulers and as advisors to each other and to the young. The presiding supernatural agent, the female seer Melissa, is also more active in part II, causing enchantments and re-

leasing from them, curing despair and madness, giving counsel, predicting the future, guarding enchanted children.

Through the romance's many interpolated tales and poems Wroth explores issues of poetics, reading, and women's writing. Some episodes valorize romances as appropriate vehicles for women's self-discovery, challenging the numerous and insistent

warnings about their danger to women. 50 Both Urania and Vera- linda find their own stories written in a book in the Temple of Love, and they proceed to "author" themselves in terms of those stories

(3.387). Pamphilia angrily flings away a book of romances, not

wishing to recognize an obvious analogue of her own sad story (2.264). In part I, story after interpolated story reprise the essentials of Wroth's love-unfaithful lover, unhappy arranged marriage, psychic suffering, court disgrace-making it seem to be (almost) everywoman's story, at least in the higher social ranks.

Several episodes emphasize the problem woman writers face in

making fictions of their own experience. The pilgrim Pelarina (another close parallel to Pamphilia and Wroth) comments on her lover's apparent (though silent) disapproval of her writing as coming too near the truth-perhaps with some allusion to Pembroke's re-

sponse to Wroth's romance:

A vanity I had about mee, which because once liked by him, and admired by our Sexe, or those, of them that I durst make my follies seene unto, a fond

49On this point but emphasizing the work's "highly ambivalent view of female rule" see Roberts, 1990, I87-207.

S5See Lamb, 1992.

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humour of writing, I had set downe some things in an idle Booke I had written, which when hee saw, he thought touched, or came too neere, or I imagine so, because in some places he had turnd downe leaves, and onely at such as he might if hee would dislike, and were those I thought hee would take notice of, yet he neither did by word nor writing, not honouring me so much, who was his slave, as to finde fault, or to seeme pleased .... So as finding my selfe thus miserable, I tooke my Pilgrimage willingly. (4.424)

For Wroth's storytellers inside the text, the implied fictional ideal is to attain enough aesthetic distance to give artful shape to life experience. The anti-heroine Antissea (who loves Amphilanthus to distraction) cannot control her own chaotic emotions and so fails in her efforts to disguise her own life story in that of a "Brittaine Lady" (2.269), whereas Pamphilia succeeds in doing so with her tale of Lindamira, "faigning it to be written in a French story" (3.423). Her audience suspects that it "was some thing more exactly related then a fixion" (4.429) but its referents remain ambiguous-as do Wroth's own in the Urania. In part II, Wroth looks beyond autobiography to other sources for fiction: here the interpolated stories are more various, de-emphasizing the motif of the suffering constant woman and offering instead a range of comic and satiric episodes, and (often) love stories ending in happy marriages.

Following romance precedent, Wroth incorporates within the romance more than seventy poems in many genres and verse forms: the songs especially display a fine lyrical gift. But she also uses these poems to continue her meta-commentary on poetics and women writers.s5 The poetics of part I locate the stimulus for poetry in deeply felt emotions and conflicting passions; poems occur at, or are reports of, moments of emotional turmoil and self-analysis, and so are common to both men and women. Amphilanthus observes condescendingly that poetic accomplishment is "rare in women, and yet I have seene some excellent things of their writings" (3.336) even as he judges Bellamira "perfect ... in this Art, pittie it is that

you should hide, or darken so rare a gift." However, Wroth's dis- position of poems in part I makes an oblique argument for the quan- tity as well as the quality of women poets: seventeen poems are assigned to male speakers, thirty-four to women. The fact that so many women characters and storytellers voice at least one poem and so assume the status of amateur poets may mean to claim that

51For other perspectives on the Urania poems and stories see Quilligan, 19902, 307- 35; and Lamb, 1990, 142-93.


status for many Jacobean aristocratic women-a claim reinforced by the narrator's observation that the lady Musalina, when in love, "was grown likewise a Poet as being a necessary thing, and as un- separable from a witty lover as love from youth" (3.422-23). Pam- philia, Wroth's surrogate as storyteller and poet, is singled out as a poet by vocation by the number of her poems (fourteen), among them a sequence of seven sonnets based, she explains, on a com- plaint by her (fictional) character Lindamira. She also receives several testimonials terming her "excellent in Poetry" (3.392), as does also the queen of Naples, Amphilanthus' mother and Pamphilia's confidant, who almost certainly alludes to the countess of Pem- broke. 52 In the poetics of part I good poets (notably Pamphilia) experience deep emotions but manage to control them in their life and their verse, finding in poetry some means of relief, control, and agency. Bad poets, notably Antissea, do not: as her life is "chaotic" so are her verses incomplete, unframed; in part II she goes mad and has to be cured by Melissa, after which she recognizes her poem as the product of a mad "poetticall furie" (2. f. I6). As a foil for Pam- philia (and Wroth), she deflects from those good poets society's cautionary tale about the psychic dangers that threaten female authors.

The interconnection of life and art, love and poetry, is played out in a scene in Pamphilia's study when Amphilanthus reads her love poems and, as he recognizes their quality ("the best he had seene made by a woman") also perceives that she is a lover, and of him (2.266). But that connection becomes more complex in part II, as

Pamphilia, learning that Amphilanthus has taken a wife, agrees (re- luctantly and probably in part for state reasons) to marry the king of Tartary. In the proposal scene, the king comes upon Pamphilia surrounded by her books and writings, and Wroth, rather like a seventeenth-century Virginia Woolf, projects through his promises a woman writer's fantasy of a supportive marriage: "Love your booke, butt love mee soe farr as that I may hold itt to you that while you peruse that, I mayJoye in beeholding you and som times gaine a looke from you if but to chide mee for soe carelessly performing my office .... Bee solitarie, yett favour mee soe much as that I

s2Hannay persuasively argues this identification in " 'Your vertuous and learned Aunt,' " 992.

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may butt attend you .... I will keep what distance you please, butt still in your sight, els how shall I serve you?" (2. f.2Iv).

In part II of the Urania a few expressive, passionate love poems are voiced by the new generation of young lovers. But most are artful performance pieces, masque songs, and other occasional poems. Their assignment does not privilege women, Pamphilia's poems are referred to but not included, and many poems are transferred between men and women speakers, eliminating the special cate- gory, "woman poet." The reason seems to be that the claims for women's poetic talents have already been made, that Pamphilia (as her final sonnet declared) has moved beyond a private, expressive Petrarchan poetics, and that Wroth assumes in part II a more comprehensive poetics, one that can accommodate the public role of providing many kinds of poems and songs for many voices and many occasions. That more comprehensive poetics also governs Wroth's pastoral drama Loves Victory with its many, various, and elegant lyrics; it may have been performed at Wroth's Durrants or at Penshurst. Here also genre transformations register a feminist politics, as Tasso, Guarini, and Daniel's pastoral dramas are rewrit- ten to emphasize female friendships, a non-hierarchical community, and female agency.53

What might we learn about reading the Renaissance from attending to these writing women?

For one thing, that many of the women's texts we have found richly repay scrutiny in literary and cultural terms, and that we need to search out more such texts and study them better, so as to write a more careful and comprehensive cultural history.

For another, that we will learn most by contextualizing early modern women's writing not only century by century but also country by country and even generation by generation, to see just how women writers began a dialogue with each other, with the literary tradition, and with the men shaping politics and culture in specific milieus. The broad question, "Did Women have a Renais- sance?" is probably best addressed through the old journalistic questions: When? Where? How? What kind? How much?

For yet another, that resistance matters (and is often subtly coded, as Annabel Patterson has shown us). And that attending to its presence in women's texts and other texts may help us recognize

53For discussion of this work, see Swift, 171-88; and Lewalski, I9922.


some important things about early modern literature and culture that the overused formula, subversion and containment, blinds us to.

Finally, that patronage and career will carry some distance, but not very far in explaining early modern women's writing. We need other categories of cultural analysis, but we also need to recognize that authorship may be the process as well as the product of asserting subjectivity and agency. This fact may usefully remind us Re- naissance scholars that, in addition to the multiple political and cultural determinants of literary texts by women or men, there is, as well, the muse. HARVARD UNIVERSITY

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