Sharpening Her Pen: Strategies of Rhetorical Violence by Early Modern English Women Writers

Sharpening Her Pen

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Sharpening Her Pen Strategies of Rhetorical Violence by Early Modern English Women Writers

Sidney L. Sondergard

Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press London: Associated University Presses

© 2002 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [1-57591-059-4/02 $10.00 + 8¢ pp, pc.]

Associated University Presses 440 Forsgate Drive Cranbury, NJ 08512 Associated University Presses 16 Barter Street London WC1A 2AH, England Associated University Presses P.O. Box 338, Port Credit Mississauga, Ontario Canada L5G 4L8

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sondergard, Sidney L. Sharpening her pen : strategies of rhetorical violence by early modern English women writers / Sidney L. Sondergard. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1-57591-059-4 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. Feminism and literature—Great Britain—History—16th century. 3. Feminism and literature—Great Britain—History—17th century. 4. Women and literature—Great Britain—History—16th century. 5. Women and literature—Great Britain—History—17th century. 6. English literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 7. English language—Early modern, 1500–1700—Rhetoric. 8. Violence in literature. 9. Sex role in literature. I. Title. PR428.F45 S66 2002 820.9'9287'09031—dc21 2002023829 printed in the united states of america

DEDICATED to Susie Titus Logan (b. 1902, d. 1990) Peggy Logan Sondergard (b. 1929) Ramona Marie Ralston (b. 1955) Three generations of women who have profoundly influenced my life, and who have wisely wielded their own sharpened pens.

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Contents Acknowledgments 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

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Introduction “On these men what wyll fall”: Reforming Voices in Anne Askew’s Examinations Shooting Strong but Never Straight: Queen Elizabeth’s Rhetoric of Altruism and Intimidation Tragic Past and Present Danger: Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie “When this sweet of-spring of thy body dies”: Aemilia Lanyer’s Polemical Passion “Violence and falsehood rules”: Subverting Masculine Romance in Lady Mary Wroth “Tears woundes & blood”: Lady Anne Southwell’s Caustic Meditation on Domestic Survival

Notes Selected Bibliography Index

13 29 48 67 87 100 119 137 175 185

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank St. Lawrence University for its generosity in providing me the sabbatical leave that made it possible to complete this manuscript. I am also grateful to colleagues Thomas L. Berger, A. R. Braunmuller, Sheila T. Cavanagh, Elizabeth Hageman, and Margaret Hannay for kindly reading and responding to portions of the manuscript.

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Sharpening Her Pen

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Introduction “Now play the man”: Self-Constructing Authors

A n early modern narrative of self-doubt provides a practical site for an initial examination of the exercise and function of rhetorical violence. “O Lord, quhy sleipist thou sa lang?” asks the first-person narrator in Ane Godlie Dreame (1603) of Elizabeth Colville (a.k.a. Elizabeth Melville), Lady Culross, “For Sathan seiks our simpill sauls to slay.” 1 Her question appears in the midst of a melancholic meditation that portrays her as too depressed to pray, her sighs and groans giving way to tears until she falls asleep, exhausted. In response, an “Angell bricht” (A3v [l. 92]) appears to her in a dream to explain that torments must be endured before rewards can be obtained (“That pleasant place most purchaist be with paine” [A4 (l. 147)]). While a reader may see this at first as the spiritual rationale of obtaining heaven by suffering worldly trials, it quickly becomes apparent that the Angel means this quite literally and is proposing a tour of hell to the narrator. They traverse waters that almost drown her (“yit my gracious gyde, / Did draw me out halfe deid and in ane sowne” [A4v (ll. 179–80)]), scrape through briar-laden thickets, and fly over “uglie beists that gaipit to devoir” (B1 [l. 196]) before coming to a place Quhairin the middis grit pricks of Iron did stand, Quhairwith my feit was all betorne and rent. Tak curage now said he, and be content, To suffer this: the pleasour cumes at last: I answerit nocht, but ran incontinent, Out ouer them all, and so the paine was past. (B1v [ll. 227–32])

Elated by her successful endurance of this torment, the narrator’s “heart did dance for joy” until learning that the Angel “was richt sore offendit” with her and that “thou yit mon suffer moir” (B1v [ll. 233, 239, 243]). This requires them to visit the “pit most black” by way of Purgatory, “the Papists purging place” (B2 [ll. 257, 262]). The Angel finally identifies himself as Jesus (“My blude alone did saif thy saull from sin” [B2 (l. 272; see also l. 284)]) and informs the narrator that if she wishes to survive and succeed in her goal, she must “Now play the man” (B2 [l. 275]). When she enters the Pit, she empathizes with the damned souls who “In flaming fyre, war frying wonder fast” and 13

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is suddenly gripped by one of the “uglie spreits” there (B2v [ll. 308– 309]). The dream ends with her crying in terror for Jesus to rescue her. The narrator interprets her dream to mean that suffering is a necessary prelude to salvation and that any sense of gain in this life is illusory because it shields some corresponding loss. She expresses this conviction through violent metaphor: “The thornie cairs of this deceitfull lyfe, / Will rent your heart, and mak your saull to bleid: / Your flesh and spreit will be at deidlie stryfe” (B3v [ll. 361–63]). Yet this conflict must be surmounted through a combination of the believer’s will and faith, even when “prick of Iron do prick yow wonderous soir, / As noysum lusts that seik your saull to slay” (B4 [ll. 389– 90]). This inventory of pending suffering serves the dual purpose of preparing the narrator psychologically for life’s unpleasantries, of offering meaning (reward) for persevering in despite of them, and also of encoding suffering as reciprocation, the price to remit for Christ’s altruistic sacrifice: he “went befoir, his saull was torne and rent / For your deserts hee felt his fathers wraith” (B4v [ll. 415–16]). By incorporating the images of violence here, the narrator generates the confidence to resist victimization in response to her spiritual crisis, and gains control of the tangible and intangible influences that could otherwise return her, as at the poem’s opening, to a destructive state of self-hatred: “I loathit my lyfe, I could not eit nor drink, / I micht not speik nor luik to nane that leifit, / Bot musit alone and diuers things did think” (A2 [ll. 6–8]). Colville’s representation of spiritual doubt and the necessity of summoning one’s faith to resist it—which might be variously read as doctrinal reinforcement for the confidently Christian reader plus a vicarious view of the torments of uncertainty and of fantasized evils, or as assistance for the reader who shares the anxieties of Ane Godlie Dreame ’s narrator and who wishes advice about negotiating the “thornie cairs of this deceitfull lyfe,” from enduring “pricks of Iron” to resisting depression (“I loathit my lyfe”)—constitutes two subjective constructions: a verse narrative that is the creation of Elizabeth Colville, and Elizabeth Colville the author. If such subjects are, as Frances E. Dolan has suggested, “discursively constituted,” then scholars of early modern subjectivity must “depend upon voluble (and therefore visible) subjects and the written evidence they leave” 2 as the foundation for analysis of those subjects’ cultural and historical meaning and significance. However, to avoid the danger of reading or depicting “early modern women as an undifferentiated category,” 3 or of proposing that early modern women authors all draw upon a shared discourse, 4 my aim in this study is to demonstrate how discrete

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women authors exploit, or evade, the use of a rhetorical discourse common in the work of early modern male writers. 5 Additionally, I wish to examine what this sampling of individual authors pursued as objectives in their writings, insofar as this can be extrapolated from recurrent arguments or theses presented in them, and to assess in what ways they attempted to achieve those objectives with the assistance of rhetorical violence in the images, tropes, and arguments they employ. Megan Matchinske has cautioned that while all women writers are subject to (and subjectified by) certain social realities and prevailing ideologies, their participation in “any single ideological principle or paradigm is at best fragmentary, their social responsibilities, forever divided, always in some sense compromised by the multitude of ideological and institutional positions and discourses that they embrace.” 6 Hence I have tried to avoid discussion of particular “grouping” paradigms that have received considerable scholarly attention, such as the promotion and formation of female community through Aemilia Lanyer’s verse (derived primarily from the dedicatory poems and “The Description of Cooke-ham”), or the modeling of desire in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (most generally considered as a discrete entity rather than as a component of the narrative structure of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania), particularly as they distract us from considering precisely how and why, over the entire available canon for each of the six writers we’ll be discussing, the individual author has exercised rhetorical violence in constructing both her text and herself as author.

Rhetorical Violence as Argumentative Methodology This study begins with the premise that all language and images selected by an author to enact the fiction of violence are encoded as vehicles of persuasion. In idiosyncratic ways that elaborate their individual differences as thinkers and as inhabitants of early modern England, each of the authors I examine makes use of a discourse of violence that reinforces personal authority while supporting argumentative objectives. Creel Froman has written that there is power inherent in language, “located there as a function of language’s infinite resources,” yet it also “takes power to establish meaning in language.” 7 The shifting semantic foundation of language that enables figurative as well as literal communication also sufficiently complicates the communicative process that the skilled exercise of it confers a particular power and authority. With a demonstrable control

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of language, then, comes the ability to direct or otherwise to influence others’ readings—even of one’s own self. Richard Helgerson’s self-crowning laureate relies upon a degree of rhetorical skill without which “[s]he could scarcely hope to accomplish [her] didactic undertaking.” 8 Authorial recognition of this power’s existence, and the pleasure (or necessity) of appropriating it, forms the substance of Richard A. Lanham’s conception of “rhetorical man,” whose sense of identity is derived from a dramatic reenactment of the self. For the author, “there is no such thing as a fact, or a text, as it actually happened. To perceive is to color with intention, to conceive as selfsatisfying pleasure,” 9 or simply as self-definition. Yet critical convention treats authorial intentionality as a notoriously elusive (and as poststructuralist theory has argued, a largely illusory) component of any rhetorical construct. The arbitrary nature of language signifiers effectively foregrounds the “lack of that authority which gives a word its proper sense.” 10 Complementing the authorial pleasure of manipulating meaning, then, reading is also pleasurable in its recognition and appreciation of that semantic play, particularly as the author’s power to influence textual meaning is transferred to the reader. Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the implied reader recognizes that this is an interactive process, incorporating both the writer’s “prestructuring of the potential meaning by the text,” and the reader’s “actualization of this potential through the reading process.” 11 The transfer of interpretive power to the reader doesn’t nullify a text’s authorially constructed potential for meaning, but it does challenge the writer’s control of it, triggering a crisis of authority. Thus when Stephen Greenblatt observes that self-fashioning is “achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile,” 12 that unnamed other—in response to whom one constructs a specific self-definition—may well be the reader, embodying the writer’s anxiety over unfavorable or inaccurate reception. Recourse to a discourse of rhetorical violence also reflects, at some level, the resistance of the author to forfeiting control over the production of meaning. By “discourse” here I mean a coherently structured, systematic encoding of meaning formulated from choices unique to a specific author, though ultimately governed by linguistic metacodes that operate similarly for all of the language users within a particular culture. “Rhetorical violence” is the replication in language of the physical experience of pain: its causes, its consequences, its analogues in conflict and suffering, real and imagined. This replication may itself prove capable of producing the trauma of pain (by stirring the reader to actual violence, or by triggering an actual physical response

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in the reader), or it may function more figuratively, provoking an illusory sensation of pain (as in an empathetic sense it “hurts” to read of another’s agony), or summoning an individual’s private and cultural memories of the experience of pain. 13 Elaine Scarry writes that pain “is an intentional state without an intentional object,” while the imagination “is an intentional object without an experienceable intentional state”: Thus, it may be that in some peculiar way it is appropriate to think of pain as the imagination’s intentional state, and to identify the imagination as pain’s intentional object. Of course, it is probably inaccurate to identify an essentially objectless state as an “intentional state without an object” since only by having an object does it exist as an intentional state: in isolation, pain “intends” nothing; it is wholly passive; it is “suffered” rather than willed or directed. To be more precise, one can say that pain only becomes an intentional state once it is brought into relation with the objectifying power of the imagination: through that relation, pain will be transformed from a wholly passive and helpless occurrence into a self-modifying and, when most successful, self-eliminating one. 14

Rhetorical violence, an authorial fiction, operates at the two levels suggested here. When the depiction of pain cues an imagined or remembered analogue in reader experience, the reader may retain objective distance from the posited fiction and can reflect on a personal relationship to it (hence the response is interactive, “selfmodifying”). An author wishing to manipulate rhetorical violence for the sake of provoking corrective action, for example, might resort to violent images or words. But if the fiction is amplified sufficiently— to the degree that one begins to subjectify the depicted experience in the fiction’s own terms, rather than distancing/dismissing it as fiction—the reader either loses the correlative connection of personal experience/imagination and participates in it without a sense of personal investment (a “self-eliminating,” the familiar phenomenon of becoming “lost” in a narrative), or becomes so empathically linked to the narrative (in “identifying” with the writer’s descriptions) that pain or discomfort actually becomes the “intentional state” that imagination ordinarily cannot cue as experience. What makes this “experience” of violence effective, rhetorically speaking, is its prevalence in human affairs. Recognizing that while “the contortions of the rhetorical tradition” can vary from “the horrors of Aristotelian catharsis and inventional torture to the dismembered images of the memory of the body in pain,” Jody Enders argues that violence “so dominates the language of aesthetics that it can never be completely escaped.” 15 The collection of Western cultural

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beliefs concerning violence, which Barbara Whitmer has called the “violence mythos,” encompasses mythological and symbolic traditions as varied (and, ultimately, connected) as “salvific violence” and “attitudes of subordination and devaluation of women, nonwhite peoples, animals, and nature.” 16 With myriad cultural beliefs as context, then, rhetorical violence is applied to confer an immediacy to textual arguments. Even when employed to support arguments conceived as beneficial to the reader, it functions as a threat, a suggestion of what can happen if the writer’s message is ignored or rejected. Joel B. Altman sees this quality as an effect of amplification, “a method of expanding one’s discourse by proliferating words and matter and appreciating one’s subject by representing it in its fullest magnitude,” investing it with “the oxymoronic capacity to enlarge something by cutting it up.” 17 Amplification “enlarges” the moment of a reader’s textual scrutiny, privileging a particular sequence to focus reader attention on it, yet this extension or interruption “cuts up” the text, temporarily interfering with narrative or descriptive momentum achieved prior to the amplified passage. It is, then, a calculated disruption for rhetorical effect. Far from being counterproductive in writing, such intratextual conflict is essential to didactic literature. Gordon Teskey has characterized allegory as “violence emerging from chaos to impose schematic order on historical process,” and suggests that the more ambitious the allegory, “the more openly violent the moments in which the materials of narrative” are shown “being actively subdued for the purpose of raising a structure of meaning.” 18 Teresa de Lauretis has noted a similar correlation between language and conflict merging to create meaning. Proceeding from Foucault’s notion of “a rhetoric of violence,” an “order of language which speaks violence—names certain behaviors and events as violent” and “constructs objects and subjects of violence,” she finds it a simple matter to conceptualize “a language which, itself, produces violence.” 19 Anthony Kubiak separates figurative violence, communicated by “the sheer force of the imagery” of one’s discourse, from literal violence on the basis of the latter operating “through the effect of discourse on seeing.” 20 To achieve literal violence, conceptual violence must intersect with the sphere of experience. Amplification is once again the rhetorical agency responsible. The verb “to strangle” conceptually signifies a constriction preventing the free passage of what is needed to sustain life; literally, by convention, of air through the throat, while a figurative constriction of the “passage” might regulate economic exchange, personal freedom, etc. When John Webster depicts the strangulation of the Duchess of Malfi, however, the concept is made concrete, a specific enactment of the violence signified

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by the verb. Even if one reads Webster’s play rather than viewing (and hearing) its dramatization, one “sees,” in Kubiak’s sense, the amplified effects of strangulation because the details of its enactment have been magnified. As we will see in examining the six subjects of this study, the use of rhetorical violence in the writings of early modern English women is as often a response to patriarchal values and conditioning as it is a technique of argumentative enhancement. By committing themselves to the project of authorship, these women become subjects— and in Marjorie Garber’s terms, “to be a subject is to have a phallus, to be male literally or empowered ‘as’ male in culture and society.” 21 As Elizabeth Colville’s narrator is instructed, then, women writers who “play the man” by entering the dominantly male sphere of authorial activity make possible a “new center of their own subjectivity” for all women and topics of concern to them, also ensuring that “different perspectives on violence become possible.” 22 In many cases, these “different perspectives” represent gendered responses to emotional concerns. Where men are culturally conditioned to repress their own emotional responses, the early modern women writers who employ rhetorical violence to amplify their arguments often do so to express feelings of “self-doubt, fear, anxiety, shame, and longings for affection and emotional support.” 23 Gwynne Kennedy has also argued that anger is a vital component in much of the work of early modern English women writers. Its potential as an agency of empowerment for women is acknowledged in the cultural strategies adopted to suppress it, treating it variously as trivial and harmless, as groundless and hence arbitrary, as hostile and dangerous, or as simply nonexistent. 24 While the study of anger as a polemical tool and as a motivation can “enable us to understand how theories of emotions, gender, and subjectivity interact” 25 in early modern England, it is important for our understanding of the intellectual complexity of the writers in this study to emphasize that their exercise of rhetorical violence is more often designed to resist or to deflect anger, than it is to feed or to channel it. 26 In order to isolate and to trace the specific strategies of rhetorical violence employed by each of the six writer subjects in the following chapters, I have depended upon a synthesis of semiotic and structuralist techniques. As the linguist A.-J. Greimas has noted, if we are “to situate the problems relating to the semantic level of the content” of a particular text, “we have to return to the manifestation of signification and search there for the structural conditions” that are operating to shape its discourse. 27 Toward that end, each author’s extant canon of texts has been analyzed with attention given to a

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network of private motives, political and social influences, and gendered responses (particularly whether they are exercised, exploited, or rejected). When the signifiers employed by each writer are contextualized by such structures, they yield a range of meaning for the analyst that is not immediately available in any single image of violence. While considering the significations of individual tropes of rhetorical violence, then, we will also be considering how they collectively communicate the semantic concerns of each author. This approach provides us an engine for identifying the strategies that codify each writer’s personal use of rhetorical violence. It ensures that our focus will be on six discrete writers who are women, rather than on a collective entity called “women writers,” a term suggesting a homogeneity of approach that is belied by the documents, and their authors, of this study.

Reclaiming Territory: Toward Revising the Text of the Body René Girard speaks of physical violence as “something eminently communicable,” 28 and this is equally true of metaphorical violence. Indeed, the common literary phenomenon of violence as a rhetoric written upon the human body may owe its proliferation in early modern England to popular culture perspectives on physical violence associated with advances in physiological awareness and with displays of officially sanctioned violence. The former contributed to a cultural desacralization of the human body. Before the College of Physicians of London received a royal grant in 1564 to use the cadavers of executed criminals for dissections, Dr. John Caius was lecturing on anatomy at the hall of the Barber-surgeons and since 1540 had been allowed to claim the corpses of four criminals each year for his highly popular demonstrations. 29 Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543) challenged the Christian conception of the body as the microcosm of all created nature, interpreting the body as a mechanism rather than a miracle, “a precise assembly of bones and flesh, a collection of organs well-coordinated with one another.” 30 While anatomies like Thomas Vicary’s The Englishmans treasure. With the true anatomye of mans body (c. 1585) increased public understanding of the mechanistic nature of bodily functions, they also provided opportunities for gender oppression via popular associations with such functions. Diagrams of the urinary tract, for example, opening to public display what was ordinarily hidden and shameful, were joined with cultural “construction of the whore’s unchaste body as grotesquely open

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and hypereffluent” to create a “semiotics of bodily debasement” or “transgressive eroticism of urinary function” 31 that helped to justify disapprobation of, and violence toward, English prostitutes. Cultural textualization of the body, then, is significantly influenced by popular attitudes and generalizations that contribute to the creation of the semantics of the body-as-text. Elizabeth Hanson explains that the Elizabethan application of torture to Catholic prisoners, at first glance a practice “conceptually allied to the epistemology of discovery,” 32 functions as a physicalized exercise of rhetorical violence. That is, the torturer writes in the language of pain, on the body of the victim/reader, replicating in this language the promise of more of the same unless an acceptable response is surrendered. 33 Catholic accounts of the information elicited under such torture, however, exposes the forced manufacture of “truths” by prisoners who become authors in order to construct narratives for survival. These in turn were misconstrued by the torturing agents, who treated “a realm of experience that the victims increasingly defined as interior, private, and subjective as though it were external reality.” 34 Karen Cunningham has verified the ubiquity (and popularity—though which was cause and which effect is debatable) of enacted violence in public entertainments, particularly in the drama. This was itself a product of Tudor monarchs trying “to organize unambiguous, ‘divinely sanctioned’ public punishments by controlling the interpretive play of trials and executions” 35 as demonstrations of regal power. By adopting “the elements of artifice available in morality plays and de casibus tragedies,” 36 they popularized violence in ways that writers cannily exploited by incorporating the publicly sanctioned “presence” of violence into their own narratives. In recent years, scholars have discussed the proliferation of corporeal imagery in early modern English literature primarily in connection with its political applications and in the production of texts like Edward Forset’s A Comparative Discourse of Bodies Natural and Politique (1606). 37 Francis Barker has seen in this popular practice the “indices of a social order in which the body has a central and irreducible place,” 38 and the centrality of the body as metaphor has been amply documented. The efficacy of the metaphor, according to John Hunt, is derived from its potentially disorienting or even startling emphasis on corporeality, “when isolated parts of the body function as metonymic or synecdochal equivalents for actions and states of being,” 39 cueing an association of political chaos with dismemberment and political coherence with the unified integrity of the body. Peter Stallybrass has adapted Mikhail Bahktin’s concept of the classical body to describe the semiotically-approved woman

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of early modern culture as “rigidly ‘finished’: her signs are the enclosed body, the closed mouth, the locked house.” As the modern notion of the nation-state was formed “according to new canons of incorporation and exclusion, so was the female body refashioned.” 40 Accordingly, the female body became a significant textual site for cultural colonization, with a variety of pejorative/controlling meanings inscribed there. Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford discuss an insidious exploitation of the patriarchally approved enclosed body metaphor that was proliferated as evidence of woman’s inferiority to man. Physicians constructed three uniquely feminine physiological functions as violations of the idealized control implicit in the image of the closed body: menstruation, parturition (e.g., since “women were constructed for breeding, it followed that they were by nature insatiable for sex and children”), and lactation (which was depicted as the unseemly “transformation of blood into milk by the female breasts”), 41 providing thereby the rationale for additional masculine control—primarily in the form of exclusion and additional insulation or enclosure—as response to these transgressions. The female body was also scapegoated and degraded through the spiritual tradition of responsibility for original sin being ascribed to Eve, her consequent punishment resulting in painful childbearing, and that essential difference from male physiology ensuring woman’s cultural association with body (in opposition to the preferred male association with mind). Helen Wilcox has argued that this resulted in women experiencing “an intense awareness of their own female bodies” and may have provided the impetus for a number of them to resist cultural pressures and turn to writing to express “their sense of the miseries of a woman’s body.” 42 Here the body metaphor’s political implications intersect with the act of writing itself, and I will argue that women authors sometimes turn to rhetorical violence to deflect attention from their literary subversion of cultural norms. Wendy Wall has speculated that “revealing” images of rape and exhibitionism—as we shall consider, for example, in the writings of Lady Mary Wroth—may have been employed to create the authorial fiction of “the voyeuristic reader,” a strategy of projection by writers “to avoid admitting a desire for public display.” 43 The conflicting motives of an author feeling compelled to communicate “the miseries of a woman’s body,” while recognizing the potential for negative results when risking “public display,” join to contribute to a feminist semiotic of rhetorical violence that works to regain the bodily territory coopted or colonized by patriarchal agents, and to exercise influence on public actions in order to resist or to discourage the enactment of physicalized violence. This is

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not to imply, however, that women writers simply began imitating the rhetorical strategies of male writers who were perpetuating norms. A feminized discourse of rhetorical violence became necessary because it was directed at change or at the individual author’s acknowledgment of the significance of gendered differences in society. It was also necessitated by the implicit imbalance in power between female and male, as Elizabeth D. Harvey has argued in her study of “transvestite ventriloquism.” If the appropriation of female voices by male authors signals to us “what is most desired and feared about women,” the converse can be said of a feminized discourse of violence that appropriates the traditional tools of patriarchy (from fear of punishment to hierarchical oppression as control) in order to demonstrate what is “most desired and feared” about it. Certainly, it is different “for a man to ventriloquize a woman’s voice than for a woman to speak in a masculine voice, since gender itself is asymmetrically constructed in relation to power.” 44 The six subjects of this study employ strategies of rhetorical violence to different effects and in varying degrees in their writings, but all are fighting for control of their own bodies and lives, for autonomy as intellectual beings, and for the authorization that will allow them to achieve those objectives. That their texts have survived them is perhaps the ultimate proof of the effectiveness of their efforts.

Reading the Amplified Messages of Six Sharpened Pens The six subjects of this study were selected to reflect the significant diversity of written work by early modern English women. Though they vary considerably in genre (including trial proceedings, state documents, public orations, lyric poetry, narrative poetry, romance, letters, expository prose, and commonplace book) and span the reigns of six monarchs (from Henry VIII through Charles I), yet they are unified by the rhetorical skill and the learned textual allusions of their authors. They also represent a balance between subjects who have received considerable scholarly analysis (Elizabeth I, Aemilia Lanyer, and Lady Mary Wroth) and those who have been the topic of relatively little critical discussion (Anne Askew, Anne Dowriche, and Lady Anne Southwell). By focusing on the individual writer, I wish to show in what ways rhetorical violence functions as a literary phenomenon, a polemical tool for each of these six women, while also modeling its use as an analytical methodology for scholars to derive meaning from a particular organic facet of a writer’s intellectual

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structure. I also hope to suggest some useful pedagogical approaches to the study of these writers’ texts while considering recurrent tropes and issues alongside private and public sociohistorical contexts. Before turning to an overview of individual chapters, I should also mention that my aim here is not to challenge poststructuralist theories of authorship—particularly in their focus on the reader rather than on the writer as the producer of meaning for any particular text—but to demonstrate to what profit a writer’s “presence,” as indicated by a particular writing strategy, in a canon of texts can be isolated and analyzed. Beginning in chronological order (as determined either by date of publication or by internal datings in manuscripts), chapter 1, “ ‘On these men what wyll fall’: Reforming Voices in Anne Askew’s Examinations,” considers the textualization of the arguments presented during the trial of Henrician heretic, Anne Askew. The first examinacyon of Anne Askewe (1546) and The lattre examinacyon of Anne Askewe (1547), curious hybrids of Askew’s own account of her testimony interspersed between the hyperbolic pro-Reformist tirades of the text’s editor, John Bale, provide striking examples of the exercise of a calculated discourse of rhetorical violence by Bale, and the equally calculated avoidance of such an argumentative discourse by Askew. Working to control the semantics both of her own statements and of those made by her inquisitors, she pursues a strategy of self-signifying that empowers her arguments while claiming authority from the Bible rather than from her own dialectical talents. She also manuevers herself into a morally superior position during her examinations by exposing the coercive tactics of subterfuge and intimidation employed by her opponents, and subsequently recodes their belief in transubstantiation—and their attack on her resistance to it—as barbaric and antithetical to Christian doctrine. Despite enduring an illegal racking on 29 June 1546, Askew steadfastly refuses to surrender her position of control in the discursive flow of the trial proceedings. Rather than exploit the undeniably hard-earned position of victim, she refuses to acknowledge defeat or even fleeting doubt and takes a stoic position that is lauded as heroic by her popularizers Bale and John Foxe—both of whom develop their portraits of her with the amplification made possible by recourse to rhetorical violence. A codification of the prominent patterns of figurative violence employed by Elizabeth Tudor, on the other hand, in chapter 2, “Shooting Strong but Never Straight: Queen Elizabeth’s Rhetoric of Altruism and Intimidation,” reveals her strategy of constructing a self-image of endangered majesty to foster her subjects’ care for her, while exercising techniques of rhetorical violence to empower

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her as monarch. Annabel Patterson suggests that the allusions in Ben Jonson’s Sejanus his Fall, which prompted an accusation of the playwright’s treason, may have been to the fall of Essex in 1601, “in which case the offence would have been to imply that Elizabeth had been a Tiberius” 45—a useful reminder that as a pragmatic tactician, Elizabeth was certainly not averse to enacting violence, particularly as it contributed to her reputation as a politician. Hence to influence, nurture, and even direct opinion about her in a solicitous rather than critical direction, the Queen employs a discourse of violence that balances her power to harm against her will to protect, toward manufacturing an image of beneficent majesty that allows her to answer the threat of politically motivated violence without seeming precipitous or malicious. In support of this, she trades on public familiarity with the trials of her youth as an imperiled princess, threatening her own rhetorical martyrdom and regularly promising her willingness, should the need arise, to “spend my blood” in defense of England and her people. Like Shakespeare’s Richard III before Lady Anne, the Queen invites those skeptical of her motives to wound her— rhetorically, that is—with their doubts. The chapter investigates the various strategies of rhetorical violence informing Elizabeth’s writings both public and private before turning to an analysis of their combined effect when brought to bear upon the vexing problem of the dangers represented by her cousin, Mary Stuart. Chapter 3, “Tragic Past and Present Danger: Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie,” examines Dowriche’s strategies of amplification through rhetorical violence to reveal an ambitious project that is much more than either a verse chronicle of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre and the growth of anti-Protestant aggression that preceded it, or a pro-Protestant condemnation of the Catholic persecutions. 46 Serving as the foundation of her poem’s feminist semiotic is the belief that reprisals for sectarian aggression are no more morally conscionable than the original acts of violence that provoked them, and she supports this belief with two signifying structures that Mieke Bal has called the “thematic” and “differential” codes of feminist discourse, 47 the former expressing a feminine ethos and aesthetics as it affects assessments of interpersonal dynamics, and the latter addressing perspectives that become conflicted or are essentially at odds due to gendered difference. Noting that early modern British women writers often draw empowerment from a controlled release of anger in their works, Gwynne Kennedy adds that at the same time, “open expressions of anger are judged negatively and associated with low social status and overall unworthiness.” 48 In support of amplification strategies, Dowriche employs rhetorical violence variously

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to stimulate reader fear and pity, to trigger historical memories, to provoke indignation or disgust, and to mediate against anger. To animate her narrative, the poet also draws upon theatrical conventions to self-consciously stage her feminist/revisionist history and thereby exploits its power to communicate a warning against the risks and certain dangers of succumbing to the seduction of sectarian violence. Publishing after the turn of the seventeenth century, Aemilia Lanyer accomplishes her assertion of self in the Salve Deus Rex Judæorum by creating a discourse of rhetorical violence that equates cruelty to Christ with cruelty to women and situates the material and theoretical locus of personal power in what an individual is willing to sacrifice for the benefit of others. Chapter 4, “ ‘When this sweet of-spring of thy body dies’: Aemilia Lanyer’s Polemical Passion,” examines the poet’s dual strategy of attacking patriarchy’s dominance by arguing that a gendered social hierarchy is inconsistent with essential Christian values and that power in society should be defined not by hegemony but by the example of Christ’s sacrifice. Lanyer complements these arguments by recoding popular masculine archetypes as feminine and subsequently employing them as standards by which to measure superior feminine virtue. Thus empowered, her female readers are exhorted to combat the sociopolitical ramifications of the murder of Christ by becoming warriors modeled after heroes of feminized myth as well as after Christ himself. In doing so, they rewrite themselves, as well as Christ’s violated body, as texts of the believer’s own shaping. Lanyer assures her readers that just as the devout male believer may separate himself from the taint of his gender’s archetypal crime against Christ by making himself Christlike through self-sacrifice, so the female believer may be compensated through reputation and empowerment for her self-sacrifice made in the name of devotion to Christ. To respond to a world in which aggression and deception are the tools of male empowerment, Lady Mary Wroth invests the fictions of her romance, The Countess of Montgomeries Urania, and her romantic comedy, Love’s Victory, with a discourse of violence that facilitates for her an explicitly feminine entrance to the genres previously monopolized by male authors. Chapter 5, “ ‘Violence and falsehood rules’: Subverting Masculine Romance in Lady Mary Wroth,” discusses the methods through which Wroth designs her writings as vehicles for the empowerment of women, by affirming a feminist aesthetic that challenges the violence implicit in male depictions of love and transfers male aggressiveness to female characters; by literalizing the metaphorical tortures of Petrarchan romantic tradition

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to amplify the emotional dangers that are risked by a woman in love; and by demonstrating that female readers interpret violence differently than male readers. Her tactics of subversion include treatment of male eroticism, in part a reaction against the thrall of masculinist society and a reversal of the male glance of control composed by the writer for the aesthetic pleasure of her female readers, though she also presents women unclothed and imperiled to signify the power of the female body as erotic signifier. Wroth’s characters speak frankly about the suffering to which men subject women, prove themselves resourceful and resilient in adversity, and demonstrate themselves capable of appropriating male power and violence, though choosing more often to eschew it. The final chapter, “ ‘Tears woundes & blood’: Lady Anne Southwell’s Caustic Meditation on Domestic Survival,” focuses on Southwell’s remarkable, unpublished commonplace book and its display of a disciplined intellect, repressed by thirty-two years of discontented marriage, as she uses rhetorical violence to map the variety of domestic, cultural, and intellectual traps awaiting women generally, though most particularly awaiting those women unfortunate enough to marry unhappily. She constructs a personal variant of Christian neostoicism that disciplines her to restrain a volatile temper, to draw strength from her sense of contemptu mundi, and to concede that violence is a politically common and effective means of coercion; as the learned allusions in her text bear witness, she tested and refined this philosophy through years of reading and reflecting. In declaring that “I write but to my self & mee / what gods good grace doth in my soule imprint,” Southwell associates her writing with her religious beliefs, but closer examination of her poetry reveals that her repeated assertions of biblical topics (e.g., her poems on the ten commandments) are almost always superceded by more personal meditations and secular musings, particularly on the nature of men. While she also uses her poetry to praise individuals she admires, or to describe and to exorcise personal irritations—such as her spiritual alienation as a staunch Protestant forced to move to Ireland with her husband and to overcome domestic challenges like filling her house with Catholic servants she did not trust—a significant proportion of her poetry is devoted to a general attack on male marital infidelity that, as a dominant trope in the commonplace book, reads in its experiential verisimilitude like the accounts of a survivor rather than of a detached commentator or narrative inventor. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the qualities and effects of her literary jousting in the pages of Sir Thomas Overbury’s A Wife Now the Widdow of Sir Thomas Overbvrye, a book celebrating the witticisms of an otherwise

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all-male coterie, as she replies with withering skill to Master John Donne and to Overbury himself. Again I would like to reassert my position that there is not a unifying feminist methodology—some sort of feminist field theory—that emerges from comparative analysis of these six writers, other than that like many early modern writers, they reflect a canny awareness of the persuasive power of violence in their age both as physical reality and as metaphor. Each individual author’s applications of rhetorical violence display her singular intellectual qualities, reminding us that while it is interesting in its own right as a literary phenomenon, this writing strategy can be used practically as an analytical approach to studying the idiosyncrasies of those writers who employ it. Rhetorical violence becomes a practical tool of personal empowerment as the result of a number of factors, among which are disdain of actual violence, belief in the political disadvantages of resorting to physical violence as persuasion, and acknowledgment, most often implicitly and reluctantly, that it may represent an author’s best, or perhaps only, access to social or political power. Ultimately, my hope in tracing the patterns of technical selection and argumentative position in the writings of these six women is to present another point of entrance into debate about early modern subjectivity and subject formation, about the presence or absence of authors in their works, and about the assessability—or the inaccessibility—of authorial intention in those works.

1 “On these men what wyll fall”: Reforming Voices in Anne Askew’s Examinations The Examinations of Anne Askew, a first-person account of the author’s treatment at the hands of a quest, or jury, of her illegal torture by church officials, and of her eventual death sentence for heresy, provides a rare opportunity in early modern literature to examine male and female applications of, and responses to, rhetorical violence in parallel. The texts, edited by John Bale (The first examinacyon of Anne Askewe, latelye martyred in Smythfelde, by the wycked Synagogue of Antichrist, with the Elucydacyon of Johan Bale [1546] and The lattre examinacyon of Anne Askewe, latelye martyred in Smythfelde, by the wycked Synagogue of Antichrist, with the Elucydacyon of Johan Bale [1547]), intersperse his glosses and commentary between her narrative passages. This should not suggest that Askew’s text is incomplete or unable to stand on its own, or that Bale’s additions “implicitly make her words nonauthoritative, almost meaningless, without the polemical framework that his glosses provide for them.” 1 Rather, Bale complements Askew’s understated account with his own voice, one that melds theological argument with fustian, to valorize the dialectical skill and scriptural knowledge displayed in her text. Specifically, Bale exercises rhetorical violence to amplify his condemnation of the religious principles of the men of the quest and those officials who were complicit in her death; Askew, in contrast, consciously eschews description of her personal suffering, and in refusing to employ rhetorical violence to elicit sympathy from her readers, models articulate argumentation and Christian stoicism as heroic behavior. Elaine V. Beilin has noted the functionality of the dialogue structure Askew employs in her portion of the text, 2 and the tone of wry irony that she adopts for it is further evidence of the degree to which she is exerting control over its discourse. Whether it is an accurate historical document or a fictive reconstruction of history, what makes it useful for the purposes of this study is the fact that Askew’s authorization in it is facilitated not by her exercise of rhetorical violence, but by the combination of her refusal to resort to it and by Bale’s enthusiastic application of it to his own arguments about the significance of her responses. Indeed, the very absence of rhetorical violence in her self-portrait allows her to foreground dialectical resourcefulness and scriptural knowledge as her most compelling 29

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personal characteristics. A martyr she may be in effect, but she encodes herself more precisely as a heroine working to shape the semantics of her own experience. As a result, she is never in her own words simply a victim or someone who would “wyshe deathe”—yet neither is she someone who would “feare hys myght.” 3

“I Anne Askew do beleve all maner thynges”: Self-Signifying and Semantic Shaping While both the First Examinacyon and Lattre Examinacyon identify Anne Askew as “the yonger doughter of Sir Wyllyam Askewe knyght of Lyncolne shyre” (19, 87), a label she did not resist, she actively rejected all attempts during those examinations to identify her as the wife of Thomas Kyme of Kelsey, also in Lincolnshire. Bale asserts that Sir William and “olde mastre Kyme” were familiars and that Anne’s father “covenaunted wyth hym for lucre”; and since her elder sister, originally contracted by her parents to marry Kyme the landowner, died before the wedding, Anne was made an unwilling substitute bride to protect the family’s financial interests in the matter. Notwithstandynge the marryage ones past, she demeaned her selfe lyke a Christen wyfe, and had by hym (as I am infourmed) ii. chyldren. In processe of tyme by oft readynge of the sacred Bible, she fell clerelye from all olde superstycyons of papystrye, to a perfyght beleve in Jhesus Christ. Wherby she so offended the prestes . . . that he [Kyme] at their suggestion, vyolentlye drove her oute of hys howse. . . . Upon thys occasyon (I heare saye) she sought of the law a dyvorcement from hym, namelye and above all, bycause he so cruellye drove her out of hys howse in despyght of Christes veryte. She coulde not thynke hym worthye of her marryage whych so spyghtfullye hated God the chefe autor of marryage. (92–93)

Bale deconstructs the marriage in order to record Askew’s performance of her wifely duties, then constructs her dually as an opponent of “papystrye” and as a student of scripture. With parallel control and intentionality, Askew manages to evade any identification with Kyme—even when questioned directly by him as part of the quest’s proceedings—at the same time evoking for quest members and, ultimately, her readers, her knowledge of biblical precedent: I beynyge before the counsell, was asked of mastre kyme. I answered, that my lorde chancellour knewe all redye my mynde in that matter, They

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with that answere were not contented, but sayd, it was the kynges pleasure, that I shuld open the matter to them. I answered them playnelye, that I wolde not so do. But if it were the kynges pleasure to heare me, I wolde shewe hym the truthe. Then they sayd, it was not mete for the kynge with me to be troubled. I answered, that Salomon was reckened the wysest kynge that ever lyved, yet myslyked not he to heare. ii. poore common women, moch more hys grace a symple woman and hys faythfull subject. (92)

The audaciously poised tone here, 4 characteristic of her testimony throughout the proceedings, seems to challenge King Henry VIII to honor the offer he made to Parliament members in a December 1545 speech: “If you know surely that a bishop or preacher erreth or teacheth perverse doctrine, come and declare it to some of our Council or to us, to whom is committed by God the high authority to reform and order such causes and behaviours.” 5 At the very least, her ability to cite the model of justice described in 1 Kings 3:16–28 allows her to evade being coded as Kyme’s wife and hence to resist being subject to his questions. 6 She asserts instead the precedent of holy scripture, and armed with its divine authorization, prevents her inquisitors from mounting a rhetorical counterattack. In this example, we see Askew’s threefold strategy for assigning her own signification to the proceedings—which she could, and did, enact—in the face of illegal proceedings and an ecclesiastical superstructure that could violate her personal rights with relative impunity. Frequently in the proceedings she confirms only what is generally accepted as “true” and noncontroversial; cites scriptural evidence to support her position; and takes the offensive rhetorically, turning questions on her inquisitors while moving logically toward her own conclusions, thereby transmitting for readers her semantics of the inquisition-as-text. When asked to sign the affirmation of faith in the transubstantiated body of Christ that Bishop Edmund Bonner has prepared, for example, she writes that “I Anne Askew do beleve all maner thynges contayned in the faythe of the Catholyck churche” (62). By confirming generalities, she deflects condemnation of her refusal to acknowledge transubstantiation. 7 In a complex interweaving of scriptures and editorializing, she makes another argumentative attack on the doctrine that resists counterargument because it is embedded in the authorization of the Bible: For it is playnelye expressed in the hystorye of Bel in the Bible, that God dwelleth in nothynge materyall. O kynge (sayth Daniel) be not deceyved Daniel 14. For God wyll be in nothynge that is made with handes of men. Acto. 7. Oh what styffnecked people are these, that wyll alwayes

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resyst the holye Ghost. But as their fathers have done, so do they, bycause they have stonye hartes. Written by me Anne Askewe, that neyther wyshe deathe, nor yet feare hys myght, and as merye as one that is bowne towardes heaven. Truthe is layed in pryson, Luce 21, The lawe is turned to wormewood, Amos 6. And there can no ryght judgement go forth, Esaie 59. (106)

In the midst of this sequence of citations is the image of the “stonye hartes” of Askew’s “styffnecked” persecutors who resist the “Truthe.” To one side of them is the assertion of God’s absence from the material world, and on the other is the juxtaposition of dire, even apocalyptic, signifiers death, prison, and wormwood (see, e.g., Revelation 8:10–11), and Askew’s heroic declaration that she remains “merye” in facing them. This strategy of selective affirmation makes it difficult for others to reinterpret her words against her. 8 Askew’s citation of scripture seems designed generally to serve either a preemptive function (to challenge her inquisitors’ desire to place her in the vulnerable position of defending her views and life) or to provide a foundation of authority upon which she can construct other arguments or rhetorical postures. When she is challenged that St. Paul forbade women “to speake or to talke of the worde of God” (30), she knows immediately that the source is 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, cites the appropriate chapter to prove herself conversant in the text (hence vying with her accuser for its authorization), and takes the argumentative lead by inquiring how many women the Bishop’s chancellor had seen preaching from pulpits. She has already imposed an interpretation on verses 34–35 that suggests they refer specifically to prohibition of women preaching, allowing her a rhetorical advantage over her opponent: “He sayde, he never sawe non. Then I sayd, he ought to fynde no faute in poore women, except they had offended the lawe” (30). 9 Askew is no lawbreaker, and as Paula McQuade has demonstrated, she was fully cognizant of the illegality of much of the proceedings against her. Yet she never asks for vengeance or reprisal from her readers on her behalf. With this in mind, we can see the degree to which even her intertextual defender, Bale (or some other male editorial hand), identifies Askew with her strategy of scriptural citation. The poem concluding the The first examinacyon, “The voyce of Anne Askewe out of the 54. Psalme of David, called. Deus in nomine tuo,” in this particular misrepresents the “voice” it purports to echo when it pleads, “I wote thu wylt revenge my wrong, / And vysyte them, ere it be longe” (72). Indeed, one of the most significant frissons in the text opposes Askew’s strategy of taking the rhetorical offensive at every opportu-

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nity against her unwillingness to transform that figurative aggression into something more specifically directed against her inquisitors. Hence when Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, tries to disarm her by claiming that her arguments are not her own (calling her a “paratte”), she regains control of the argument by anticipating its direction: “I tolde hym agayne, I was ready to suffre all thynges at hys handes. Not onlye hys rebukes, but all that shuld folowe besydes, yea, and that gladlye” (94). By disallowing the element of surprise in the progression of arguments, Askew ensures that any allusion to a death sentence for her cannot be used as a persuasive tool by her opponents. 10 She successfully turns this gain to additional advantage by using it to condemn the divines who would insist on her death as enemies of the faith they purport to represent: Then the Byshopp sayd, I shuld be brente. I answered, that I had serched all the scriptures yet coulde I never fynde there that eyther Christ or hys Apostles put anye creature to deathe. Well, well, sayd I, God wyl laughe your threttenynges to scorne, Psal. 2. Then was I commaunded to stande a syde. (98)

Here she combines all three strategies: She cites a “fact” of the faith that no one would deny (Christ did not condone violence); she exercises the power of authority vested in scriptures to assert what she alone cannot (here referring specifically to Psalm 2:4–6, where God derides those subject kings who oppose his anointed king—with myriad allusion potentialities); and she wrests the rhetorical high ground back from Winchester by responding to his pronouncement with informed admonition rather than fear. Regardless of whether this is an accurate historical reconstruction or a fictive variant on history, it clearly reflects a particular semiotic intentionality that does not derive its efficacy from recourse to rhetorical violence.

Resistance as Power: “acornes were good ynough” Askew was arraigned at the Guildhall in London, charged with heresy, 28 June 1546. Her crime was to have denied the doctrine of transubstantiation as stipulated by the first point of the Act of Six Articles (31 Hen. VIII, c. 14): “that in the most blessed sacrament of the altar, by the strength and efficacy of Christ’s mighty word, it being spoken by the priest, is present really, under the form of bread and wine, the natural body and blood of our Saviour Jesus Christ conceived of the Virgin Mary; and that after the consecration there remaineth no substance of bread or wine, nor any other substance, but the substance

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of Christ, God and man.” 11 The Act stipulated unambiguously the penalty for conviction on this particular: “Any who, after 12 July 1539 by word, writing or printing, declare anything contrary to the first article, or who despise the said blessed sacrament shall, together with their supporters, be guilty of heresy and burned.” 12 Askew could not have been unaware of the consequences likely to follow her personal challenge of this portion of the “whip with six strings,” as the Act of Six Articles was known colloquially. Hence we have what would seem an ideal opportunity to witness a writer’s application of rhetorical violence to effect communication of the vehemence of her protest—yet part of Anne Askew’s strategy to shape the semantics of her construction of the process leading to her heresy arraignment is to eschew violence altogether. If, as in the examples of the other women writers in this study, rhetorical violence is employed both as an authorization/compensation mechanism to give female authors a common ground with their male peers, and as a tool for amplifying or intensifying the author’s intentions for the text, we should consider what alternative technique Askew is exercising. Complementing her strategy of choosing to confess only what is “true” and noncontroversial in her testimony, Askew often refuses to respond directly to challenges or questions, choosing instead to evade them wittily or to redefine and redirect them. When first questioned at Saddlers Hall, London, in March 1545, she is asked to interpret some of the scripture she has cited in her defense. She refuses, explaining “that I wolde not throwe pearles amonge swyne, for acornes were good ynough” (21). Here she throws allusion to Matthew 7:6 at Christopher Dare, one of the twelve appointed members of the quest. Even Bale misses the canniness of the reference: the reason that one should not throw pearls before swine is “lest they treade them vnder their feete, and turning againe, all to rent you.” 13 Askew knows that any subjective readings of scripture she offers will be open to debate and attack—so she deftly avoids offering any. She similarly outwits Master William Pagett, an advisor of King Henry VIII, after he proves unable to force anything from her with his “manye gloryouse wordes” (99): “Then he asked me, if I wolde commen with some wyser man? That offer, I sayd, I wolde not refuse” (101). Pagett’s condescending offer is recoded by Askew’s droll reply, demoting him from authority figure to straight man. With even more impressive argumentative agility, Askew challenges her questioners to rethink their assumptions about transubstantiation. She reminds them that Christian spirituality depends upon symbolism for much of its representation, and that to read certain metaphors of the faith literally is to distort the lessons orig-

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inally intended for them—especially concerning the many figures signifying Christ: Ye maye not here (sayd I) take Christ for the materyall thynge that he is sygnyfyed by. For than ye wyll make hym a verye dore, a vyne, a lambe, and a stone, cleane contrarye to the holye Ghostes meanynge. All these in deede do sygnyfye Christ, lyke as the breade doth hys bodye in that place. And though he ded saye there. Take, eate thys in remembraunce of me. Yet ded he not byd them hange up that breade in a boxe, and make it a God, or bowe to it. (99)

Jesus calls himself the “door” to salvation in John 10:9, and the “vine” to God’s vinedresser in John 15:1; John the Baptist identifies Christ as the “Lamb of God” in John 1:29; and witnesses against Christ cite his claim to destroy the temple of God, stone by stone, and rebuild it in three days (e.g., Matthew 24:1–2; 26:59–61), ignorant of its prophetic self-allusion to his death and resurrection. Askew knows that none of the men of the quest, or the divines subsequently interrogating her, would take these as literal avatars of Christ, and hopes to present them with the unassailable logic that the same must be true of communion bread and wine. Similarly, she insists that to prove that the communion bread is not, indeed, God, “lete it lye in the boxe but iii. monthes, and it wyll be moulde, and so turne to nothynge that is good. Wherupon I am persuaded, that it can not be God” (111). She invites her readers, and her religious opponents, to read Christ’s words in Matthew 26:26–27 as ritual rather than miracle, maintaining her considered opposition to the first of the Six Articles despite the consequences attendant on it. 14 According to the Jesuit Robert Parsons, in A Treatise of three Conversions of England, from Paganisme to Christian Religion (1603–4), King Henry VIII was informed that Anne Askew “did in secrett seeke to currupt diuers people, but especially weomen, with whome she had conversed; and that she had found means to enter with the principall of the land, namely with Q. Catherine Parr herselfe, and with his neeces the daughters of the Duke of Suffolke and others. . . . And by her confession he learned so much of Q. Catherine Parre, as he had purposed to have burned her also if he had lyued.” 15 He reports that the principal charge against the Queen was supported by books discovered in her closet, “brought or sent her in by Anne Askue. Whereof the witnesses were, the Lady Herbert, Lady Lane, Lady Tyrwitt, and others. And by that occasions was the said Anne Askue putt to the racke, for the discouery of the truth.” 16 This would seem to suggest that the real focus of the proceedings against

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Askew was her subversion of patriarchal power through the empowerment of other women. Indeed, the divines interrogating her regularly drop hints to Askew that there is important information she is withholding from them. At one point, Bishop Bonner offers an “unsauerlye symylytude,” That if a man had a wounde, no wyse surgeon wolde mynystre helpe unto it, before he had seane it uncovered. In lyke case (sayth he) can I geve yow no good counsell, unlesse I knowe wher with your conscyence is burdened. I answered, that my conscience was clere in all thynges. And for to laye a playstre unto the whole skynne, it might apere moche folye. (45)

Askew is not intimidated by the rhetorical violence of the wound metaphor or by the implication that she is “wounding” herself by not revealing the information she has concerning other heretics. In attempting the trope, Bonner betrays his frustration at failing to elicit the desired information through more direct questioning. Askew, however, extends the figure and reveals that there is no “wound,” nothing to “uncover,” because she has no information that troubles her conscience. More incisively, she argues that no sympathetic doctor would approve the “folly” of covering her up entirely, because such a covering would smother the patient. She means this, of course, both figuratively and literally, and her reconfiguration of the metaphor as accusation of her accuser once again takes the rhetorical advantage away from him. Ordinarily in the Examinations, then, Askew does not employ rhetorical violence to empower her words; aware of its persuasive power, she nevertheless persistently resists it, retaining control of self and self-signification while exposing her persecutors as agents of violence. She does, however, sometimes manipulate rhetorical violence through inference to signify this. Devising yet another image that resists interpretation of transubstantiation as a literal enactment, she insists that “my God wyll not be eaten with tethe, neyther dyeth he agayne. And upon these wordes, that I have now spoken, wyll I suffer deathe” (144). Reformer opposition to the doctrine of transubstantiation is here overlaid with two entrapping tropes: those who take communion, believing it to be the actual flesh and blood of the deity, are cannibals (“eaten with tethe”) guilty of murdering Christ anew (“dyeth he agayne”). While these images might simply be designed to dissuade her listeners from their position, there also seems to be an argumentative pattern in the text that seeks to identify Askew with the Christ she refuses to violate.

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Lambs to the Slaughter: A Merging of Icons Perhaps the most important rhetorical intersection of Askew’s and Bale’s voices in the Examinations occurs in the trope of identifying— sometimes explicitly, most often implicitly— Askew with Christ 17 to evoke reader sympathy for her suffering. In his commentary on her responses to Christopher Dare’s opening questions, Bale overdetermines the signifier of the inquisitor: “All craftye wayes possyble, sought thyse quarellynge qwestmonger, or els the devyll in hym, to brynge thys poore innocent lambe to the slaughter place of Antichrist. Moche after thys sort sought the wycked Pharysees by serten of their owne faccyon or hyered satellytes with the Herodyans, to brynge Christ in daunger of Cesar, and so to have hym slayne” (24; cf. his association of Winchester with Caiphas [120]). Dare variously connotes devil, Antichrist, Pharisee, and Herod to Askew’s “poore innocent lambe,” and the quest becomes the pathway to “the slaughter place” where Askew will be “slayne.” Bale reveals his Reformist objectives for this association when he writes at the conclusion of the First Examination that Askew, “latelye done to deathe by the Romysh popes malycyouse remnaunt,” is “now canonysed in the precyouse bloude of the lorde Jesus Christ” (71). The divines responsible for Askew’s condemnation, a “malycyouse remnaunt” of the former Catholic power structure, must be symbolically degraded to divest them of all remaining authority, so the image of Askew is elevated to the status of a saint of the Reformed church, “canonysed” in the blood of the Redeemer—effectively, her own blood, completing the identification of her with Christ. There is more at stake here than Bale coopting Askew’s biography to serve as Reformist propaganda. If Askew is shown to be as much a leader as a martyr, a reassuring presence as much as a lamented absence, then she becomes a rallying icon for future resistance—as a Reformer, to Roman pressures and aggressions; as a woman, to patriarchy. She is herself an active participant in this semiotic process, as when she discusses Winchester’s role in the Latter Examination: “the Byshopp sayd, he wolde speake with me famylyarlye. I sayd, so ded Judas whan he unfryndelye betrayed Christ” (97). Her resistance further reinforces the implicit identification of her with Christ while simultaneously casting doubt on the motives of the Bishop, identifying him with the archetypal betrayer of confidences. Bale simply extends the analogy when he asks the reader to place inquisitors Sir Thomas Wriothesley and Sir Richard Rich in a related context: “Compare me here Pylate with Wrisleye the hygh chauncellour of Englande, with

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Ryche and with other whych wyll be counted no small moates” (151; see the extended parallel between Wriothesley and Pilate, 151–53). Here is more evidence of the self-fashioning described by Stephen Greenblatt as “achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile,” 18 a positive construct jointly conceived by Anne Askew asserting her talent and knowledge while awaiting execution and by John Bale hoping to affect England’s religious future. 19

The Reality of Pain and Rhetorical Stoicism Following her first round of interrogation by the quest, and prior to appearing before the Privy Council at Greenwich on 18 and 19 June 1546, Askew reports that “Then was I had to the Countre, and there remayned xii. dayes, no frynde admytted to speake with me” (31). Though the two Counters—one in Poultry thoroughfare and the other until 1555 in Bread Street (moved to Wood Street because it had been used to lodge itinerant prostitutes and thieves) 20— were prisons for minor offenders and debtors, they nevertheless constituted a much different world than Anne Askew had known before her twelve days there. A late seventeenth-century description of Counter conditions cites “a mixture of scents from mundungus, tobacco, foul feet, dirty shirts, stinking breaths, and uncleanly carcases” that was “far worse than a Southwark ditch, a tanner’s yard, or a tallow chandler’s melting-room.” 21 Askew’s contact with Counter conditions proved merely a prelude to greater suffering ahead. In late June 1546, during the period recorded in the Latter Examination, she reports becoming “sore sycke, thynkynge no lesse than to dye.” She requests to speak with Hugh Latimer, the Reformist minister and confidant of women in Queen Catherine Parr’s coterie, and is denied the opportunity: “Then was I sent to Newgate in my extremyte of syckenesse. For in all my lyfe afore, was I never in soch payne” (102). Imprisonment in Newgate was for most prisoners “a melancholy last stop on the way to the hanging tree,” and felons “were held until trial and execution, or, rarely, released.” 22 As Tudor London’s chief criminal prison, Newgate was continually overcrowded and had a history of operating in deteriorating condition. First established during the reign of King John, the prison received no major renovation until Dick Whittington, Lord Mayor of London, left money for this purpose in 1419 (earning it the nickname “Whit’s Palace”). However, it was not remodeled again until after 1629, when it was reported to be “in a state of utter ruin.” 23 To be sent into its darkened corridors when ill must have seemed itself a death sentence to Askew, but she

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refuses to dwell on the horrors she experienced there, instead turning directly to the analysis she wrote in Newgate of what the scriptures literally say, and figuratively mean, on the subject of the eucharist (103–4, 106, 108, 109). The task of rhetorically amplifying her experience there falls to Bale, who sees the first portion of the Act of Six Articles as religious extortion, “Els shall we to stynkynge Newgate by their spirytuall appoyntment, be we never so sycke, and within a whyle after, to the fyre in Smythfelde. For Christes membre must tast with hym both esell and gall” (103). Bale specifically designs this iconic merger of Askew and Christ to recall the torments that were prelude to the crucifixion, and in so doing works to increase the emotional intensity of the narrative that Askew in her own commentary stoically resists in order to signify instead her absolute confidence in the Reformed faith. The public refutation of the doctrine of transubstantiation could be construed as “constructive treason, and be considered to justify the torture even of women, as in the instance of Ann [sic ] Askew in 1546,” 24 despite such action’s absolute illegality (McQuade 10– 11). 25 Thus Askew was taken from Newgate to the Tower, there to be tortured into recanting and/or revealing the identities of those at court who were supporting her heretical resistance. Bale claims that she never fainted during the 29 June 1546 ordeal “whan she was so terrybly racked of Wrysleye the chaunceller and Ryche, that the strynges of her armes and eyes were peryshed,” though she did deride “the madnesse of the Byshoppes and their speche men [i.e., spokesmen]” (11). The reader anticipates a gruesome description ahead when Askew turns to discuss the racking in her own words, but the text contains instead a remarkably understated description of her torment: “Then they ded put me on the racke, bycause I confessed no ladyes nor gentyllwomen to be of my opynyon, and theron they kepte me a longe tyme. And bycause I laye styll and ded not crye, my lorde Chauncellour and mastre Ryche, toke peynes to racke me their owne handes, tyll I was nygh dead” (127). This is the extent of the detail depicting the racking itself. Again, the subject’s commitment to passive resistance and the vehement cruelty of the aggressors likens Askew’s experience to Christ’s—and since drafted after the experience, it reflects a calculated rhetorical intent in its refusal to re-create the event graphically for readers. The author is not writing to evoke sympathy or terror; she is chronicling the power of faith to sustain a believer, but the effect of this rhetorical stoicism is to signify uncompromising heroism through endurance. An ideal example of the dual dynamic working in the text, juxtaposing Askew’s discourse of quiet resistance to Bale’s vitriol and

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rhetorical violence, can be seen in their remarks following the description of the racking. Bale reads madness and papal influence in the “ragynge furyes” of Wriothesley and Rich: A kynges hygh counseller, a Judge over lyfe and deathe, yea, a lorde Chauncellour of a most noble realme, is now become a most vyle slave for Antichrist, and a most cruell tormentoure. Without all dyscressyon, honestye, or manhode, he casteth of hys gowne, and taketh here upon hym the most vyle offyce of an hangeman and pulleth at the racke most vyllanouslye. O Wrisleye and Riche ii. false christianes and blasphemouse apostataes from God. What chaplayne of the pope hath inchaunted yow, or what devyll of helle bewytched yow to execute upon a poore condempned woman, so prodygyouse a kynde of tyrannye? (128)

Askew, with a quite different immediate aim, reiterates her heroic stoicism in an unornamented detailing of her treatment immediately after the torture: Then the lyefetenaunt caused me to be loused from the racke. Incontynentlye I swounded, and then they recovered me agayne. After that I sate ii. longe houres reasonynge with my lorde Chauncellour upon the bare floore, where as he with manye flatterynge wordes, persuaded me to leave my opynyon. But my lorde God (I thanke hys everlastynge goodnesse) gave me grace to persever, and wyll do (I hope) to the very ende. (130)

Bale exploits the officials’ un-Christian violence to recode them variously as ideological automatons (“slave for Antichrist”), as common thugs (“the most vyle offyce of an hangeman”), and as targets of dehumanizing magics (“inchaunted” and “bewytched”). His verbal arsenal includes defamation (“vyle”), emasculation (denying Wriothesley’s “manhode”), and a religious counterattack that interprets the divines as “blasphemouse apostates.” His inflammatory approach makes all the more striking Askew’s plain depiction of her treatment following the racking. She doesn’t describe the back trauma she must have experienced, or the consequent muscle agony that must have been exacerbated by two hours on a concrete floor. The only adjective she applies to Wriothesley, his “flatterynge” words, contributes a devastating condemnation to Bale’s portrait of him, signifying him as a hypocrite and liar so desperate for results that he rejects all compassion to pursue them. His “flatterynge wordes” to the injured Askew confirm as accurate Bale’s label of him as a “most cruell tormentoure.”

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Her reticence to discuss it aside, Anne Askew did feel the agonies of the violence done to her and she reports that after the posttorture interrogation “was I brought to an howse, and layed in a bed, with as werye and payneful bones, as ever pacyent Job, I thanke my lorde God therof. Then my lorde Chauncellour sent me worde if I wolde leave my opynyon, I shuld want nothynge. If I wolde not, I shuld fourth to Newgate, and so be burned” (132). This marks the last strategy of Askew’s opponents to displace her sense of self and belief with the image of pending pain, informed by her preceding experience of it. This is precisely the intention of torture, which is, as Elaine Scarry explains, the intense pain that destroys a person’s self and world, a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe. Intense pain is also language-destroying: as the content of one’s world disintegrates, so the content of one’s language disintegrates; as the self disintegrates, so that which would express and project the self is robbed of its source and its subject. 26

If Askew succumbs to this “language-destroying” intimidation, she loses her connection to everything she has previously asserted and her arguments become negated in retraction. Instead, she employs the stoic account in the Latter Examination, told “without decoration and with restraint,” 27 to affirm her position and to undercut the victory of the individuals who extralegally tortured her and who wielded their authority to achieve her death sentence: I understande, the counsell is not a lyttle dyspleased, that it shulde be reported abroade, that I was racked in the towre. They saye now, that they ded there, was but to fear me. Wherby I perceyve, they are ashamed of their uncomelye doynges, and feare moch least the kynges mageste shulde have infourmacyon therof. Wherfor they wolde no man to noyse it. Well, their crueltye God forgeve them. (134)

Bale and the “blynde bloderynge Balaamytes” I prefer to see Bale’s role in the Examinations as that of publicist rather than of propagandist or apologist, 28 although there are undeniably elements of both in his accompaniment of Askew’s words with his own. That her writing had a profound impact on him is clear in his responses throughout the text, and Leslie P. Fairfield has even posited that Bale later wrote his own autobiographical work, The

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vocacyon of Johan Bale, after witnessing “how successful Anne Askew’s accounts of her examinations had been,” 29 particularly since the First Examination went quickly through five editions, and the Latter Examination through four. In a recent study, Krista Kesselring has argued a position for Bale in early modern feminist history and discourse, reasoning that through “his direct admonitions, use of feminine allegory and, primarily, his presentations of exemplary women in the context of apocalyptic history, he responds and contributes to the prescriptive discourse of gender.” 30 To consider this further, we should examine the tactics he employs to enhance the dissemination of Askew’s texts and then turn to his application of rhetorical violence in his commentary and to the question of what the composite text gains through his aggressive defense of Askew via attack on her persecutors. Bale explicitly identifies himself not as a voice of independent authority on Anne Askew, but as the conduit for the exchange that this “gentylwoman verye yonge, dayntye, and tender, had with that outragynge Synagoge, in her ii. examynacyons, about the xxv. yeare of her age, whom she sent abroade by her owne hande writynge” (7; cf. 107). The emphasis on her youth and vulnerability justifies his protective “presence” in her text, but he also sees himself working in unison with her; 31 for while the present account is in the vernacular, “it wyll from hens forth occasyon us, to set fourth in the Latyne also, that afore we wrote onlye in the Englysh, and so make their spirytuall wyckednesse and treason knowne moche farther of” (8). Its publication has been demanded “at the instant desyre of serten faythfull men and women, yea rather at the secrete mocyon of God, that the truth theroff myght be knowne the worlde over” (19). The incorporation of both genders into this authorization is part of his strategy for Askew’s account to reach the largest possible audience, demonstrated, for example, by the text accompanying the woodcut on the Latter Examination’s title page. The dialogue on the sides of the illustration remain the same as for the First Examination, but the passage underneath has been changed to cite Joel 2:28–29, “I wyll poure out my sprete vpon all flesh (sayth God) your sonnes and doughters shall prophecye” (73), empowering both men and women to speak out in defense of their faith. 32 Well aware of the power of rhetoric to defame as well as to promote, 33 Bale takes the images of violence, cruelty, and defilement that Askew refuses to employ and applies them as part of a sustained invective against all Catholic ritual and officials. To Askew’s assessment concerning masses and the effects achieved by priests during them, for example, that “it was great Idololatrye [sic ] to beleve more

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in them, than in the death whych Christ dyed for us” (25), Bale responds with a catalogue of foul pejoratives and a spurious genealogy tracing Catholicism to the Druids: the scriptures call them fylthynesse, rust, chaffe, draffe, swylle, dronckennesse, fornycacyon, menstrue, mannys dyrt, adders egges, poyson, snares, the breade of wycked lyes, and the cuppe of Gods curse. Their orygynall grounde shulde seme to be taken of the Druydes or pagane Prestes, whych inhabyted thys realme longe afore Christes incarnacyon, and had than practysed sacryfyces publyque and pryvate. (25–26)

Bale alludes to human “sacryfyces” here as part of a persistent trope signifying the bloodthirstiness of Askew’s Romish persecutors 34 within his “rhetoric of suffering and martyrdom” that makes it possible to establish “a typology of true sainthood” 35 to memorialize Askew’s stoic courage. Askew’s narrative reports that Bishop Bonner urged her to invite “soche lerned men as I was affeccyoned to” to the proceedings, mentioning four particular Reformer disputants by name; Bale recodes the offer as “soche a benyvolent gentylnesse, as not onlye sought her bloude, but also the bloude of all them whych are here named, yf they had than come to thys examynacyon” (39). The mass is denigrated as the site of the “legerdemaynes” of priests, facilitated by “straunge observacyons borowed of the Jewes and paganes olde sacryfyces,” those same priests ultimately “wytches in their wytcherye, all sorcerers, charmers, inchaunters, dreamers, sothsayers, necromansers, conjures, cross dyggers, devyll raysers, myracle doers, doggeleches, and bawdes. For without a masse, they can not wele worke their feates” (145). Askew’s refusal to recant her stand against transubstantiation is rhetorically transmuted into an epic battle of good versus evil (forty years before Spenser crafted his Redcrosse Knight or Britomartis), and her many individual tribulations are coded collectively as a chorus announcing her victory: Neyther was she perverted with flatterynge promyses, nor yet overcommen with terryble threttenynges of deathe. Neyther doubted she the stynke of Newgate, nor yet the burnynge fyer in Smythfelde. But coveted rather deathe of her bodye for the syncere doctryne of Christ, than lyfe of the same under the ydolatrouse doctryne of the Romysh pope. (133)

Once the argumentative foundation of his discourse of rhetorical violence is in place, 36 Bale supplements his images with histrionics and invectives, further inflating a flamboyant style that already presents a sharp contrast to the deadpan wit of Askew’s narrative. Alliteration abounds as he condemns the sophism of Friar William

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Peryn—whom he calls “fryre fynke”—by lamenting “O blasphemouse beastes, and blynde bloderynge Balaamytes” (28). He joins accusation of pedantry to that of unholy magicks when he notes that to trick Askew, “the cloynynges [i.e., deceptions] of your conjurers, and the conveyaunces of your sorcerers must nedes be seasoned with Aristotles Physyckes, and sawced with Johan Donses subtyltees,” 37 leaving her no alternative in their debate but to “become a creature of your olde God the pope, or els be burned” (51). The taint of Catholicism, he asserts, is malicious and unavoidable; though someone might say of nobleman Richard Rich, for example, that he is “no spirytuall enemye, bycause he is not anoynted with the popes grese,” it is nevertheless “the sprete (of blasphemye, avaryce, and malyce) and not the oyle, that maketh them spirytuall”: “he is in the hart anoynted with the sprete of Mammon, betraynge with Judas at the Byshoppes malycyouse callynge on” (120). Bale takes the opportunity to bring the issue of Reformation into the political arena by noting that while England may no longer be Catholic, “the present handelynge of Anne Askewe” reveals “our Englysh rulers and judges in their newe Christyanyte of renouncynge the pope, to excede all other tyrauntes in all crueltye, spyght, and vengaunce” (125). While Bale certainly misses no opportunity to expound his own religious perspectives, he nevertheless does so while foregrounding the image of Askew, her life, and her text.

The Physical and Literal, the Metaphysical and Metaphorical One other male voice of encomium that may be usefully compared with Askew’s is that of John Foxe, who includes a condensed version of the Examinations in his Acts and Monuments (1563), and who appends “In Annae Askevae Constantissimae foeminae et martyris bustum, Epithaphium Sapphicum” [“Epitaph in Sapphic Verse upon the Tomb of the Most Steadfast Woman and Martyr Anne Askew”] to the conclusion of his Rerum in Ecclesia Gestarum Commentarii (1559). The eight stanzas consistently emphasize the physical nature of Askew’s suffering to make it more memorable, the same tactic that later earned it a prominent place in Elizabethan culture. It opens with a tone of incredulity, demanding of an unnamed official with “manibus cruente” [“blood-soaked hands”] (l. 1) why he “laceras” [“mangles”] (l. 3) this young woman, his superior in virtue, on the “eculeis” [“rack”] (l. 2). 38 What seems to be an attempt to assign blame, however, quickly shifts to a recreation of the scene of Askew’s

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torture—in more detail than her own and with rhetorical amplification of those details. Lines 5–6 reveal a cause-and-effect interpretation of the racking, suggesting that her “Fortius . . . pietas nitescit” [“Courageous . . . pietry radiates”] into Christian history because she was “Pressa tormentis” [“Pressed by torture”]. Stanzas 3–5 dramatize the enactment of the torture, beginning with the “immani rabidus furore” [“savage raging madness”] (l. 9) of the executioner aimed at terrorizing the woman who with “ruptis iacet illa neruis” [“damaged sinews lies there”] (l. 10), in hopes that she will “socias ut edat / Relligionis” [“bring forward her cohorts in religion”] (ll. 11–12). 39 Foxe celebrates the fact that her courageous silence “Machinam uincit” [“overcomes the machine”] (l. 14)—echoing Bale’s emphasis on this bravery while also respecting the understated tone of Askew’s account in the Latter Examination—leaving her torturers “stupent” [“stunned”] (l. 15), themselves temporarily powerless. Her “Art[i]bus luxis” [“Joints forced out of position”] and “cedunt / Ossa iuncturis” [“Bones separated from what connects them”] (ll. 17–18) until “nihil in pudico / Corpore infractum est” [“nothing in [her] chaste / Body is [not] shattered”] (ll. 18–19). The reader’s empathetic wince is what Foxe aims at; pain, even someone else’s, is memorable if depicted in sufficient detail. The seventh stanza of his commemoration makes this objective plain, declaring that this heroine who had never been “alias reuinci” [“previously conquered”] (l. 25), “moribunda tandem / Soluitur flammis, cineres coronat / Vita perennis” [“dying at last / Released by the flames, her ashes rewarded with / Life eternal”] (ll. 26–28). Like the Elizabethan sonneteers who would be writing thirty years later, the poet rarefies his subject as an abstraction of herself—here in the unlikely blazon of a martyr’s ashes—while also promising to make her immortal through his poem. Displaying several of the same techniques applied in her prose, “The Balade whych Anne Askewe made and sange whan she was in Newgate” demonstrates that her stoic position does not require the amplification that rhetorical violence can provide to make it effective. 40 It opens with a simile likening Askew to an “armed knyght” (l. 1) who challenges the world with her “shielde” of faith (l. 4), a “weapon stronge” (l. 5) in “strengthe / And force of Christes waye” (ll. 9–10). Despite her self-signification as an archetypal combattant against evil who will prevail “Though all the devyls saye naye” (l. 12), the poet does not follow narrative precedent to take her persona knight into battle—for this is a song about resistance, not about aggression. Askew proves herself no eager martyr as she prays that Christ “wyll take my part” (l. 19) and “Undo therfore the locke /

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And thy stronge power sende” (ll. 23–24); she will not fight on her own behalf, but asks her savior to “fyght thu in my steed” (l. 28) as she remains indifferent to the “cruell spyght” (l. 30) of her enemies. Three images unify the conclusion of Askew’s lyric, each contributing to her self-signification as uncompromising defender of the Reformed faith. Too modest to congratulate herself openly for successfully holding out against the tactics of intimidation and torture, she creates the metaphor of herself as a ship that weathers all storms: I am not she that lyst My anker to lete fall For every dryslynge myst My shyppe substancyall. (ll. 33–36)

The radically understated encoding of her torments as no more than “dryslynge myst” magnifies her personal heroism, and she maintains the consistency of her modest tone here by arguing no particular authorial status for her work: “Not oft use I to wryght / In prose nor yet in ryme” (ll. 37–38). A second image describes a “ryall trone” (l. 41) where “Justyce shuld have sytt” (l. 42) that instead is occupied by “one / Of modye cruell wytt” (ll. 43–44): “Sathan in hys excesse” (l. 47). Without reiterating the names already established in the Examinations, Askew moves her story into the mythic realm of conflict between Christ and Satan, portraying her religious and political opponents as limbs of the archenemy of the true faith and hence as unworthy of any additional discussion individually. The final image calls on the reader to join with Askew in thinking “On these men what wyll fall” (l. 52) when they are ultimately judged by Christ. The reader recalls the self-righteousness of the inquisitors, the personal vindictiveness of the divines who turned the wheel of the rack, and then witnesses the verdict Askew assigns them: Yet lorde I the desyre For that they do to me Lete them not tast the hyre Of their inyquyte. (ll. 53–56)

Her steadfast resistance to participation in the culture of violence practiced by her opponents confers on her the kind of moral superiority that we associate with survivors as well as with martyrs, those who have not merely experienced suffering, but who refuse to perpetuate

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it in hopes that it may one day be ended. While other women writers in this study share this same ethos, Askew’s writings differ from theirs rather essentially. Where others depend upon rhetorical violence to present ideas and arguments with urgency or insistence, or to provide argumentative power that translates into authority, Askew speaks across the ages from personal experience more terrible and devastating than anything that might be created from tropes. 41

2 Shooting Strong but Never Straight: Queen Elizabeth’s Rhetoric of Altruism and Intimidation T he scholarly Elizabeth Tudor, whose fortune it was to be tutored by individuals as erudite as William Grindal and Roger Ascham, spent her adolescence in a turbulent environment that would hardly seem conducive to producing the accomplished student of language and literature that she became. She was declared illegitimate as a consequence of Archbishop Cranmer’s determination that her mother’s relationship with the Earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, had invalidated her marriage to Henry VIII. A passage from eleven-year-old Elizabeth’s manuscript, “The Glass of the Sinful Soul,” an “interpretive translation of a poem by the spiritual libertine” Queen Marguerite of Navarre, 1 reads as a metacommentary on her own intrafamilial conflicts: “I never saw it (or else it was kept wondrous secret) that any husband would forgive his wife after she had offended and did return unto him. There be enough of them which for to avenge their wrong did cause the judges to condemn them to die. Others, seeing their wives sin, did not suddenly spare their own hands to kill them” (EG 126). After Anne Boleyn’s execution, Elizabeth found herself fighting slanders from many unspecified sources. In a letter dated 28 January 1549, for example, at the age of sixteen, she felt compelled to defend her honor by complaining to Edward Seymour, the Lord Protector, about certain “rumors abroad” concerning his brother, Thomas, such as “that I am in the Tower and with child by my lord admiral. My lord, these are shameful slanders” (CW 24). In time, of course, the princess Elizabeth actually was held in the Tower—from 17 March to 19 May 1554. These experiences collectively help her “to hone her growing political skills” 2 and to develop the ability to anticipate and to address challenges expeditiously. Her personal observations and experiences of the power of words to shape the fate of individuals and of state policy provide her with the rhetorical strategies that she employs consistently in private and public documents throughout her life, reflecting the appropriateness of her personal motto, semper eadem, always the same. In assessing the directions of late twentieth-century studies of 48

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Elizabeth, Julia M. Walker has noted that “paradigms of sentimental mythology alternating with venomous misogyny” 3 prompted critics like Frances A. Yates and Roy Strong to construct their own criticism on the concrete foundation of Elizabethan court culture. Their selfconsciously positive focus was challenged by the work of scholars like Carole Levin, Leah Marcus, and the New Historicists of the 1980s who chose to consider Elizabethan culture as a more encompassing entity that was manifested in gender politics, social economies, and a host of public representations not addressed by earlier critics. Walker’s concern in tracking the evolution of Elizabeth criticism through the 1990s is that “artificial construction of seeming oppositions has come to be mistaken for critical analysis.” 4 With this admonishment in mind, I would note that my emphasis on Elizabeth’s self-construction through rhetorical violence is not a reaction against considering how her image may have been more widely disseminated and read in early modern British culture, but simply reflects my interest in exploring the pragmatic techniques she exercised in composing it. This chapter will codify the prominent patterns employed in Elizabeth’s rhetoric of violence toward demonstrating how she constructs a self-image of endangered majesty to foster her subjects’ care for her, and will analyze the techniques for manipulating rhetorical violence that empower her as a monarch.

“Power have I none to cry help”: Exploiting the Imprisoned Princess John Foxe reminds the readers of his Acts and Monuments “what extreme misery, sickness, fear, and peril” the princess Elizabeth suffered during her imprisonment in the Tower and at Woodstock, falsely “being fetched up as the greatest traitor in the world,” and pruriently amplifies the dangers she endured, exclaiming that she was “guarded with a sort of cutthroats, which ever gaped for the spoil, whereby they might be fingering of somewhat.” 5 Foxe’s characterization of Elizabeth pursues two objectives, the first to elicit sympathy and a protective attitude toward the Queen, who is revealed to be as human and as vulnerable to suffering (particularly at the hands of Catholic tormentors) as her subjects. 6 He also reveals her self-confidence, her ability to face and to defeat threats with assurance and courage. When a “secret friend” suggests that she should submit herself to Queen Mary for mercy, to guarantee her safety, the princess responds, “I know myself (I thank God) to be out of the danger thereof, wishing that I were as clear out of the peril of

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my enemies; and then I am assured I should not so be locked and bolted up within walls and doors as I am. God give them a better mind when it pleaseth him” (8: 617–18). Despite the fact that “during the imprisonment of this lady and princess, one master Edmund Tremaine was on the rack, and master Smithwike, and divers others in the Tower were examined, and divers offers made to them to accuse the guiltless lady” (8:619), nothing could be proven against her, and this gives greater persuasive force to the assertion of the couplet Elizabeth carved with diamond into a window at Woodstock: “Much suspected by me, / Nothing proved can be. / Quod Elizabeth the prisoner” (CW 46). Peter E. McCullough has observed that although the reconfiguring of the prisoner princess into the canny, long-suffering monarch whose political apprenticeship began in unjust imprisonment “was a stock part of Elizabeth’s mythography” certainly “given wider currency by Foxe,” it was also “perhaps initiated by herself.” 7 Elizabeth’s own treatments of the subject of imprisonment are in many ways similar to Foxe’s—even those not explicitly composed for public view. While “The Glass of the Sinful Soul” ostensibly translates work by Marguerite of Navarre, the text’s increasing popularity after the accession of Elizabeth (in editions of 1568–70, 1582, and 1590) suggests that it was also read as a reflection of the Queen’s own experience and philosophy. Thus when Elizabeth calls on the reader to “behold how in pain, crying, and weeping my poor soul, a slave and prisoner, doth lie without clarity or light, having both her feet bound by her concupiscence, and also both her arms through evil use. Yet the power to remedy it doth not lie with me, and power have I none to cry help” (EG 114; cf. 128–29), the combination of the first-person narration and of reader recollection of the incarceration endured by the Queen creates the illusion that these are the Queen’s own words, giving an experiential immediacy to the “pain, crying, and weeping” suffered by the noble monarch. The first English prayer contained in Elizabeth’s private, handwritten Book of Devotions expresses her gratitude to God for “Drawing my blood from kings” and for providing “in times of most danger, most gracious deliverance: pulling me from the prison to the palace: and placing me a Sovereign Princess over thy people of England” (BD 19). In this she welcomes the responsibilities and liabilities incurred by her regal position and expresses a humble gratitude for her preservation. Perhaps more telling is the mixture of indignant resignation and calm anticipation of requital for the wrongs done her, recorded in “Written on a Wall at Woodstock” (c. 1554–55):

2.

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O Fortune, thy wresting, wavering state Hath fraught with cares my troubled wit, Whose witness this present prison late Could bear, where once was joy flown quite. Thou causedst the guilty to be loosed From [b]ands where innocents were enclosed, And caused the guiltless to be reserved, And freed those that death had well deserved. But all herein can be naught wrought, So God send to my foes all they have thought. (CW 45–46)

The “cares” of the prisoner are further increased by her recognition of the injustice of actual criminals “that death had well deserved” being “loosed” while “innocents” remain “enclosed.” Reminiscent of the Earl of Surrey’s melancholy “Prisoned in Windsor,” which laments his adult imprisonment in the same edifice that holds so many happy boyhood memories, Elizabeth also acknowledges the unpleasant irony of being kept under arrest on the Woodstock site “where once was joy flown quite.” The innocent’s complaint is addressed to proverbially capricious fortune; to live is to experience its mutability, regardless of whether one’s blood is common or royal. Amid her assertions of guiltlessness and the inescapable reality of bondage as she writes these words (the duality of meaning in “herein can be nothing wrought”), Elizabeth significantly places her hope for justice, rather than for deliverance, in God. Not wishing to appear impious, the princess directs her frustrations and doubts at fortune, a harmless target. Moreover, in approving that “God send to my foes all they have thought,” she cannot be accused of vindictiveness. She wishes for her jailors no more nor less than they have wished for her.

“This is my state”: The Semantics of Potential Force A prayer intended primarily for the Earl of Essex, alluding to the show of power by the May 1596 naval expedition to Cadiz under his leadership, exhibits the Queen’s strategy of identifying political violence as a necessary reality in order either to rationalize it, or to resist it—displaying by the latter a restraint that connotes confidence and strength. Elizabeth rejoices that God “by Thy foresight dost truly discern how no malice of revenge nor quittance of injury, nor desire of bloodshed, nor greediness of lucre hath moved the resolution of our now-set-out army, but a needful care and wary watch that no neglect of foes nor our surety of harm, might breed either [danger] to us or

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glory to them” (CW 426). Even if the flotilla’s message is merely one of intimidation, this is recognized in our own times as the rhetoric of the Cold War and of the preemptive strike. The Queen justifies her philosophy of anticipatory action with a trope George Puttenham calls “Dichologia, or the Figure of excuse,” 8 reminding herself that she moves in a most precarious sphere: “I live in the world full of wickedness: where delights be snares, where dangers be imminent, where sin reigneth, and death abideth. This is my state” (BD 20). In a prayer composed in Italian, she similarly advises herself to remain wary, lest “I come to be attacked by the violent winds and fierce tempests with which thrones are assailed, since Christian kings have for their enemy a world subdued to that fierce roaring lion who goes about always seeking whom he may devour” (BD 31). To maintain the respect and support of England, particularly as a national power facing “for their enemy a world” of Catholic and other opposition, the Queen must continually demonstrate “that a woman is capable of behaving in a virile manner and therefore of governing men.” 9 This means knowing when to exercise force and when to identify the potential for such action—in order to make clear that viable options have not (yet) been enacted. It also requires rhetorical maneuvering analogous to what Susan Frye has associated with Elizabeth’s gendered exploitation of the theory of the king’s two bodies. By refusing to acknowledge the distinction between the monarch’s natural body and the body politic, the Queen was able to style herself as the ideal ruler for an England tautologically characterized by its very association with her as “a female body politic.” 10 Similarly successful in adapting masculinized behavior and discourse, Elizabeth’s success in translating decisive action/restraint into effective governance emboldened her on many occasions to advise young James VI of Scotland to be similarly “virile” in dealing with real and potential threats: I thank God that you beware so soon of Jesuits that have been the source of all these treacheries in this realm and will spread like an evil weed if at the first they be not weeded out. . . . Far be it from Scotland to harbor any such! And therefore I wish your good providence may be duly executed, for else laws resemble cobwebs whence great bees get out by breaking and small flies sticks [sic ] fast for weakness. [15 October 1586] (CW 290) [Urging James to finish off the Catholic earls that have plotted against him:] Take me, my deere brother, aright, as that creature that ever shunneth to take bloud, but of those that might and shold have betrayed the innocent, and, in such cases, the less evill is to be chosen. [19 May 1589] (LEJ 164)

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Who to peril a king were inventores or actors, they should crake a halter if I were king. Such is my charitie. . . . Nether should all have the whippe though some were scourged. . . . [I] pray the Almighty God to inspire you in time, afore to late, to cut their combes whose crest may danger you. I am void of malice, God is judge. [January 1592/3] (LEJ 76–77) Weede out the weeds lest the best corne fester. [26 November 1592] (LEJ 78) 11

Self-identified as “that creature that ever shunneth to take bloud” and one “void of malice,” Elizabeth counsels her “brother” monarch to be more canny about knowing when to exhibit clemency, and when to strike authoritatively and “cut their combes whose crest may danger you.” That she had learned this lesson personally even before acceding to the throne is verified in one of her earliest official acts, the general amnesty of Tudor Proclamation 452, “Announcing Coronation Pardon of Elizabeth I” (15 January 1559), written in the first-person voice of the Queen. Among the few offenders not included in the pardon are those involved in “any conspiracy, confederation, abetting, or procurement made or had against our person, or for the imprisonment of our person in the time of our dearly beloved sister Mary, formerly Queen of England.” 12 While not all should “have the whippe though some were scourged,” neither should the monarch forgive those who have endangered her security: “Such is my charitie.” The Queen makes periodic assertions that she personally eschews violence to complement this strategy of reminding herself and diverse audiences that it is prudent to anticipate the threat of politically motivated violence. 13 She translates Marguerite of Navarre’s distress over the paradox of the Old Testament’s injunction against killing, while its books record widespread slaughter committed in the name of God: “Thou givest us a law, and punishment if we do not fulfill it; and Thyself would not be bound to it, forbidding us the thing which Thyself didst. For Thou dost forbid us to kill any man; and Thou dost kill and spared none of three thousand that Thou caused to be slain” (EG 125). Elizabeth underlines this with her own reference in the margin to the example of Exodus 32—quite likely because of its proximity to the commandment forbidding murder in Exodus 20:13—and Moses’s command in verses 27–28: “Then he said vnto them, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Put euerie man his sworde by his side: go to and fro, from gate to gate, through the hoste, and slay euerie man his brother, and euerie man his companion, & euerie man his neighbour. / So the children of Leui did as Moses had commanded: and there fel of the people the same day about thre

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thousand men.” 14 The canny Elizabeth recognizes that a religious paradox of this nature can be exploited as a defense either for or against war or violent retaliation. Defending the use of torture, however, seems more problematic. A letter from the Queen to James discussing the Jesuits rhetorically asks, “What religion is this, that the say the way to saluation is to kil the prince for a merit meritorious? This is that the haue all confessed without tortur or menace. I swere hit, on my worde” (LEJ 40). Editor John Bruce notes that this “must not be understood to mean that they were none of them subjected to torture or menace, but that the confession in question was not made under torture or menace” (LEJ 40). There is, after all, a legal rationale to justify its application. For the practitioner, writes Elizabeth Hanson, “torture is a violent extension of an insufficient discourse”; 15 in cases involving potential treason, where the withholding of evidence or testimony, “an insufficient discourse,” itself constitutes a treasonous act, torture can be legally, even morally, sanctioned to counteract it. Indiscriminate torture, however, is the sign of an incompetent leader and may be coopted by the canny opponent through a form of rhetorical blackmail. Elizabeth manipulates her carefully publicized abhorrence of violence to secure additional credibility for her as a “sisterly” advisor to James VI. She warns him about the lingering dangers posed by the presence of James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, who nearly succeeded in capturing the Scottish king and his chancellor, and laments in a letter composed in January 1591/2, “but Cassandra was neuer credited til the mishap had rather chanched [sic ] than was preuented. The poore man who, against his wyl, was intercepted with all suche epistelz as traitors sent and receued, was for reward put to the bootes; so litel was any thing regarded that procided from your best frind” (LEJ 70). 16 Scottish agents had intercepted an English messenger who carried evidence against James’s Catholic lords, and subjected him summarily to the boot, a device employed to crush the leg and foot inserted into it. Elizabeth seizes the opportunity to recode this action as a personal affront, signifying how little credence James places in her Cassandra-like political prophesying. She gets additional diplomatic mileage out of the incident in a subsequent letter: Let me remember you how well I was thanked or he rewarded that once brought all the letters of all those wicked conspirators of the Spanish faction. . . . Was I not so much doubted as it was thought an Italian invention to make you hold me dearer, and contrived of malice, not done by cause? And in that respect, the poor man that knew no other of his taking but

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as if thieves had assailed him, he most cruelly suffered so guiltless a martyrdom as his tormentors doubted his life, so sore had he the boots when they were evil worthy life that bade it. 17 (CW 366–67)

Making a “martyrdom” of this diplomatic blunder, Elizabeth revises history: the messenger who in the earlier letter was “intercepted” by the Scots is described a year later (January 1592/3) as someone who “brought . . . by cause” the letters in question to James. Even if the episode was not orchestrated “to make you hold me dearer,” such a scheme clearly could be concocted by one with Elizabeth’s rhetorical skills and political perceptiveness. The Queen’s threats directed against others, both covertly and overtly, similarly communicate the promise of violence in order to inspire her audiences to reassess their actions. 18 A speech dated 5 November 1566, for example, depicts the individuals who have caused public unrest over the question of “succession of the crown” as “unbridled persons whose heads were never snaffled by the rider” (CW 94). 19 This allusion reminds the parties in question that Elizabeth is securely seated in the saddle of state, and if heretofore they have been allowed the freedom to criticize her decisions concerning marriage and succession, it is only because she has chosen not to “snaffle” them—not because she is unable to do so. She writes on 8 October 1588 to James that the “venimous poison and mortall hate” of the Spaniards toward the English “hath turnid to prosecute them most, yea, every place hath servid the turne to ruine their hope, destroy themselves, and take them in the snare they laide for our feet” (LEJ 158–59). The germane subtext here is for James to protect his own kingdom by ensuring that Scots policy toward England reflects no self-destructively parallel “poison” and “hate.” In an address almost five years later, on 10 April 1593, she closes Parliament by citing the example of the thwarted Spanish invasion in order to address the fate awaiting traitors. She recalls that at the time, certain English subjects “upon the coasts forsook the towns and fled up higher into the country, leaving all naked and exposed to his entrance. But I swear unto you if I knew those persons or may know of any that shall do so hereafter, I will make them know and feel what it is to be so fearful in so urgent a cause” (CW 329). Elizabeth writes to James in August 1585 about “the horrible and sudden murder of my most faithful subject and most valiant baron,” Francis Lord Russell, second Earl of Bedford, during a truce-day along the northern borders. She deplores the act itself, but its political ramifications in light of attempts to protect the English/Scottish league provoke her to pray “God send us better luck after our league be finished than

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this bloody beginning may give Calends of, else many a red side will follow such demerits. But I hope you will spare no man that may be doubted of such a meaning. I mean not only of the murder but of the breaking out upon our borderers, which commonly are the beginnings of our quarrels” (CW 263–64). 20 It seems unlikely that even the confident young Scots king could have remained unmoved by the Queen’s threat of “many a red side.” Her displeasure was indeed a power with which to conjure, as noted in Tudor Proclamation 450, “Licensing Shipping, Suppressing Piracy” (21 December 1558), with its prohibitions made “upon pain of confiscation and forfeiture of their ships and goods, and of imprisonment of their bodies, and indignation of her highness.” 21 One wonders indeed which of the three consequences to consider the most dire.

“To spend my blood”: The Benefits of Rhetorical Martyrdom By constructing these systems of self-defense and justification, Elizabeth facilitates deployment of the complementary strategy of asserting her vulnerability and her readiness to die in the service of her country. The effect is to secure a (perpetually renewable) rhetorical martyrdom without betraying any politically damaging weaknesses. Elizabeth recognizes the power of this trope while still a princess and ingratiates herself, for example, to Catherine Parr in the letter that prefaces “The Glass of the Sinful Soul” by baring her own soul, placing herself at the Queen’s mercy: “I hope that after having been in Your Grace’s hands there shall be nothing in it worthy of reprehension and that in the meanwhile no other (but your highness only) shall read it or see it, lest my faults be known of many” (EG 112). 22 She turns vulnerability explicitly into willing self-sacrifice in her speech, “To the Lord Mayor of London” (15 January 1559), assuring her listeners to “persuade yourselves, that for the safety and quietness of you all, I will not spare, if need be, to spend my blood” (PS 63). Her proroguing of Parliament, 29 March 1585, trading on public familiarity with the trials of her youth, includes the assertion that “I know no creature that breatheth whose life standeth hourly in more peril for it than mine own, who entered not into my state without sight of manifold dangers of life and crown, as one that had the mightiest and greatest to wrestle with” (CW 182). The degree to which the Queen willingly suffers private discomfort to secure the public weal is transparently displayed in her poem “On Monsieur’s Departure,” which opens with the regal burden that

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“I grieve and dare not show my discontent,” and concludes with a prayer-like request that she be allowed to “live with some more sweet content, / Or die and so forget what love e’er meant” (CW 302–3). 23 While this is further evidence of Elizabeth exercising literary control over political necessity, it also reflects another facet of what Katherine Eggert has associated with “showing like a Queen”: the author demonstrates that “love lyric could be converted into a vehicle for working out extended permutations of the possible associations and/or contradictions between lyric poetry and female power.” 24 That is, while the lyric documents the Queen’s sacrifice of love for political expediency and public approval, it exacts an emotional price from the reader who is obliged to consider the author’s pain and loss. Theodora A. Jankowski explains that Elizabeth’s “political persona as the Virgin Queen” was similarly effective “primarily because of its anomalousness”; as “the only virgin, there was no fear that other women might try to usurp her power.” 25 Elizabeth occupies the position of being uniquely powerful in England, but to protect that authority she periodically marshalls her rhetorical skills to prove herself uniquely vulnerable. The range of threat posed by the enemies described in Tudor Royal Proclamation 817, “Banishing All Jesuit and Secular Priests” (5 November 1602) signifies both the dangers threatening the Queen and the justice of taking action to preclude them, “as it is plain that the treason which is lodged in the hearts of the Jesuits and their adherents is fraughted with much more violent malice, peril, and poison both against us and our state than that disloyalty and disobedience which is found in the other secular priests that are opposite therein unto them.” 26 Perhaps Elizabeth’s most powerful exercise of this vulnerability trope occurs in her address to a joint delegation of lords and commons, 5 November 1566. Addressing the lingering ramifications of her having once been declared illegitimate along with her sister, Mary, the Queen declares, I wish not the death of any man, but only this I desire: that they which have been the practitioners herein may before their deaths repent the same and show some open confession of their faults whereby the scabbed sheep may be known from the whole. As for my own part, I care not for death, for all men are mortal; and though I be a woman, yet I have as good a courage answerable to my place as ever my father had. I am your annointed queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything. I thank God I am indeed endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat, I were able to live in any place in Christendom. (CW 97)

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All of the rhetorical strategies noted thus far appear in this passage. Once again the Queen eschews violence and expresses her desire for “some open confession,” however unlikely it is that any such confession would issue without catalyst to prompt it. She boldly likens herself to Henry VIII, whose independence and fighting spirit were legendary, and reinforces the comparison with an image of her bravely wandering, undefended and quintessentially vulnerable since unclothed. The semiotic objective here is to rally support, to amplify the image of the feisty Elizabeth sufficiently to render moot concerns past (illegitimacy) and future (need to produce an heir): it is enough, she implies, that this Queen occupies the English throne so compassionately and so authoritatively. Elizabeth’s assertion before the troops assembled at Tilbury, 9 August 1588, that “rather than any dishonor shall grow by me, I myself will venter my royal blood,” follows her famous acknowledgment of having “the body but of a weak and feeble woman” empowered by “the heart and stomach of a king,” but it also continues her powerful pledge “to lay down for my God and for my kingdom and for my people mine honor and my blood even in the dust” (CW 326). This latter is not so much a promise, however, as it is a threat, constructed by the Queen to inspire in her soldiers an analogously selfless devotion. If England and its Queen remain vulnerable, she may be forced to shed her own blood “even in the dust,” fighting in the stead of inadequate defenders herself. 27 The threat of violence to the Queen has already been identified as a rhetorical rationale for the expedient response in political conflicts; here the strategy is to forecast destruction in order to provoke preemptory resolution. John Foxe provides a model of this technique in the Acts and Monuments when describing drunken threats made against princess Elizabeth by Robert Farrer, a London haberdasher, who said, “That jill hath been one of the chief doers of this rebellion of Wyat; and before all be done, she and all heretics her partakers, shall well understand of it. Some of them hope, that she shall have the crown: but she and they (I trust) that so hope, shall hop headless, or be fried with faggots, before she come to it” (8: 623). Though recounted well after the fact, the anecdote functions to promote the indignation and vigilance of the reader (who proudly identifies with the Protestant heroes coded by Farrer as “heretics”) on behalf of the threatened (now Queen) Elizabeth. 28 Even the Queen’s private prayers reflect this trope, modifying her responses through self-inflicted threats. The French Prayer in her Book of Devotions contains the meditation, “I acknowledge my transgressions, and my black and bleeding sins are constantly before me, and they terrify me” (BD 25; cf. EG 114,136), while the Second English

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Prayer similarly admonishes “I acknowledge O my King that without thee my throne is unstable, my seat unsure, my kingdom tottering, my life uncertain” (BD 41). The prospect of violence-to-self is treated as a compelling deterrent, and anticipatory action is the surest guard against it as she writes to remind James concerning the subject of treason: “Suppose suche, I pray you, to resemble a golden houke that oft deceaues the vnwary fische, and makes him receaue his worst in lieu of bettar hope” (LEJ 27).

“The prise of my blood”: Wounds and Maladies in the Body Politic Gail Kern Paster has observed that blood, bleeding, and wounding can function as gendered tropes constituting “part of an insistent rhetoric of bodily control in which the bleeding body signifies as a shameful token of uncontrol, as a failure of physical self-mastery particularly associated with women.” 29 Elizabeth wields such tropes in a variation on her strategies of calculated vulnerability and willing selfsacrifice: she introduces images of her own bleeding or wounding figuratively to amplify threats she wishes to eliminate. Even the very mention of the royal blood carries a significant rhetorical impact. Urging the direction she desires certain inquiries exploring recent plots against her to take, in January 1584/5 Elizabeth requests of James “that a question may, upon allegeance, be demanded by yourselfe of the mastar Gray, whether he knoweth not the prise of my bloude, wiche shuld be spild by bloudy hande of a murtherar, wiche some of your nere-a-kin did graunt. . . . O most wicked treachere, to gusche the droppes of innocent bloud, yea, of suche as perhaps hath saued often thers!” (LEJ 11). 30 The Queen places herself in the figurative position of having already been murdered (made “to gusche the droppes of innocent bloud”) in order to raise the specter of the consequences of such an act (“the prise of my bloude”) both for Gray and for James, toward prompting action to prevent what the trope proposes has already been done. In another instance, Elizabeth suspects that her cousin, Mary Stuart, during a recent illness has considered passing her claim to the English succession to the French King and his heirs. To forestall this, she self-administers a symbolic wounding in a letter to the Queen of Scots (25 May 1569) that signifies the degree of her loyalty: “but if any such bad accident had befallen you in this country, I believe really I should have deemed my days prolonged too long, if previous to death I had received such a wound” (LQE 55). 31

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She invites wounding even more explicitly as a trial of her truth when she writes to Queen Mary I (2 August 1556) in response to the June 1556 plot of a pretender named Cleobury, who sought to pass himself off as the Earl of Devonshire, Edward Courtenay, declaring himself king by virtue of marriage to Elizabeth, whom he proclaimed Queen. Elizabeth contends that this is simply the work of the devil, “And among earthly things I chiefly wish this one: that there were as good surgeons for making anatomies of hearts that might show my thoughts to your majesty as there are expert physicians of the bodies, able to express the inward griefs of their maladies to their patient” (CW 44). This figurative dissection connotes complete surrender and openness, and the promixity of the “inward griefs” of the second half of her simile hints that she continues to suffer as long as the Queen harbors any doubts about her loyalty. The ability to exercise such rhetorical strategems is essential to effective rule, as Elizabeth writes to James (June/July 1585) “that who seaketh two stringes to one bowe, the may shute strong, but neuer strait; and if you suppose that princes causes be vailed so couvertly that no intelligence may bewraye them, deceave not yourselfe; we old foxes can find shiftes to saue ourselves by others malice” (LEJ 17; the bow metaphor is repeated in a letter dated 1 July 1588 [CW 355]). Elizabeth’s talent for selecting and assembling heavily connotative referents that convey a semiotic momentum to their primary, or focal, signs is typified by the quatrain written circa 1565: “No crooked leg, no blearèd eye, / No part deformèd out of kind, / Nor yet so ugly half can be / As is the inward, suspicious mind” (CW 132). The proximity of “crooked,” “blearèd,” “deformèd,” and “ugly” gives unambiguously pejorative connotations to the “inward, suspicious mind” that is the focus of the Queen’s condemnation here. Not surprisingly, this rhetorical control makes her equally adept at exploiting the conventional trope of the infected body politic: just as deformation of the body signals disease within it, political disruptions and deceptions can be coded metaphorically as maladies in the body politic. While her favorite metaphorical malady for this purpose would seem to be infected humors, or superfluity of melancholic humor, 32 she employs the signifiers of painful, life-threatening disease to add rhetorical force to her political arguments. To save the patient (i.e., the state), no treatment is too extreme. Hence Tudor Proclamation 758, “Establishing Commissions against Seminary Priests and Jesuits,” warns (and rationalizes) that if the Jesuits are not stopped, “and severe orders executed, the same will remain and spread itself as a secret infection of treasons in the bowels of our realm, most dangerous, yea, most reproachful to be suffered in any well ordered commonweal.” 33

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This situating of the Jesuit threat in the innermost regions of the body politic signifies its powers of infiltration and potential for destroying from within, but also figuratively associates the Jesuits with what one ordinarily expects to find in the bowels. Elizabeth serves as diagnostician to King James VI in letters dated 1590, and July 1593, respectively: Eccept my howrely care for your broken countrey, to to muche infected with the maladie of strangers humors, and to receue no medecin so wel compounded as if the owner make the mixture appropriatted to the qualetye of the siknes. Knowe you, my deare brother, for certaine, that thos ulcers that wer to muche skined with the doulcenes of your applications wer but falsly shaded, and wer within filled with suche venom as hathe burst out sins your departure with most lewd offers to another king to enter your land. . . . (LEJ 57–58; cf. 6 July 1590 letter [CW 365]) A long roted malady, falling to many relapses, argues, by reason, that the body is so corrupt that yt may be patched but never sound. When great infections light on many yt almost poisoneth the whole countrey. Yt were better, therfore, that the greater parte were kept solide though some infected perish. (LEJ 83)

Decay and gangrenous poisoning, the consequences of a failure to intercede authoritatively (treating political dangers with “doulcenes” instead of punishment) before the spread of the identified infections, have so weakened the body of the Scottish state internally that severe measures “appropriatted to the qualetye of the siknes” must now be taken to effect its cure. The Queen designates herself as healer by virtue of “my howrely care for your broken countrey,” and hence advises that the body politic can be saved only if some of its “infected” members are amputated. This prescription must have appeared very familiar to the Scots King, since it is the same radical surgery Elizabeth prescribed for his mother, Mary.

Rhetorical Excision of “the daughter of debate” The full range of strategies that constitute Elizabeth’s personal discourse of rhetorical violence are applied to the delicate issues of relation and succession in her writings to, and concerning the ultimate disposition of, her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. As early as 1561, in an interview with Scots ambassador William Maitland concerning Mary’s right to succession, the Queen accurately anticipates Mary’s potential for violence but confidently declares that “howsoever she is

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descended, I suppose that during my life she will not wrest the scepter out of my hand; I suppose she will not debar those children which possibly I may bring forth, from succeeding in my place” (Public Speaking 66). The gruesome murder of Lord Darnley on 10 February 1567 34 represented for Elizabeth the end of any possibility of Mary succeeding her. The letter of consolation she composes (24 February 1567) in response to the deed functions simultaneously as accusation and as counsel: My ears have been so deafened and my understanding so grieved and my heart so affrighted to hear the dreadful news of the abominable murder of your mad husband and my killed cousin that I scarcely yet have the wits to write about it. And inasmuch as my nature compels me to take his death in the extreme, he being so close in blood, so it is that I will boldly tell you what I think of it. . . . I will not at all dissemble what most people are talking about: which is that you will look through your fingers at the revenging of this deed, and that you do not take measures that touch those who have done as you wished, as if the thing had been entrusted in a way that the murderers felt assurance in doing it. (CW 116)

The Queen figuratively presents herself as victimized (“affrighted” by the “abominable” crime to one “so close in blood”) in order to seem altruistic in worrying more about Mary’s public image than about herself or about vengeance for her murdered cousin, Darnley. Without needing to identify whether she shares the opinion of “most people” who believe that the killers acted either as Mary directed or at least with her approval, Elizabeth warns her cousin that failure to expose and punish those responsible (choosing instead to look “through your fingers at the revenging,” the very sort of avoidance for which she later scolds James so many times in their correspondences) will function as confirmation of her complicity. Another string of heavily connotative referents is assembled to signify Mary’s guilt without necessitating that the Queen first actually accuse her cousin of promoting or supporting Darnley’s murder. Elizabeth’s letter to Sir Henry Norris, ambassador in France, dated 23 February 1570, provides ample motives for the crime: “the King her husband, with whom she was lately grievously offended, was cruelly strangled, and horribly murthered, the principal murtherer named the Earl Bothwell, having a virtuous lawful wife (of a great house) living, became suddenly her husband being first immediately upon the murther committed, and directly and openly imputed to him advanced by her to high degrees of honour and estates of lands, who nevertheless vilely misused her, to the great grief of all her faithful subjects and friends” (LQE 75). The innocent vulnerability of

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Darnley (signified by his being “cruelly strangled” and “horribly murthered”) semantically transforms the description that his wife was “grievously offended” with him into an indictment (at the very least, of insensitivity) against her. Bothwell is not merely labeled a murderer, but an egregious adulterer (since he already had “a virtuous lawful wife” from “a great house”) as well. 35 Mary admitted she was raped (“vilely misused”) by Bothwell before marrying him, 36 and her subsequent preferment of him appears a clumsy attempt to place him beyond retribution. Given the opportunity of these rhetorically volatile signs, the Queen sets in motion the resolution to problems related to her cousin that she had been considering since the earliest years of her reign. Elizabeth’s political canniness warns her “to shun such snares / As threatens mine annoy” in her poem, “The Doubt of Future Foes” (c. 1568–71), and its lines reveal the degree to which cousin Mary recalls for her the horrors of Catholic persecution committed by her sister, Mary I. As Jennifer Summit has argued, the manuscript circulation of the poem itself served the rhetorical function of supporting Elizabeth’s “broader strategy for dealing with the Queen of Scots.” 37 In an eerily accurate forecast of later treatment of the exiled Mary, Elizabeth vows not to allow history to repeat itself: The daughter of debate That discord aye doth sow Shall reap no gain where former rule Still peace hath taught to know. No foreign banished wight Shall anchor in this port: Our realm brooks no seditious sects— Let them elsewhere resort. My rusty sword through rest Shall first his edge employ To p[o]ll their tops that seek such change Or gape for future joy. (CW 134)

Convinced of her participation in Darnley’s demise and hence of her unsuitability as a future Queen of England, Elizabeth meets the prospect of Mary’s succession (eclipsing thereby the peace established by Elizabeth’s “former rule”) either legally (leading her to “gape” in anticipation of “future joy”) or through conspiracy (the “change” that “seditious sects” pursue) with the threat of her “rusty sword.” The male (“his”) sword’s rust is attributed to “rest,” to the

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internal peace that has ensued since her accession, though the visual similarity of rust and dried blood certainly complements the Queen’s pledge to usurpers that she will “poll” (or, if one chooses the variant reading “pull” as alluding to hanging) “their tops.” To rationalize the inevitable death sentence awaiting Mary, Elizabeth returns to the powerful tropes of blood to signify the gravity of the threats posed to her by the Queen of Scots’ continued existence. Her first reply to the Parliamentary petitions urging the execution of Mary, delivered 12 November, reports that “I must protest that I am not grieved in respect of myself or of mine own life—which for itself I do not regard. . . . Wherefore the regard of life which I have is in respect of you and the rest of my good subjects, knowing that my blood could not have been shed but yours and theirs should have been spilt likewise” (CW 187). 38 In figuratively linking the bloods of self and subjects, the Queen seeks to unify the body politic against the divisive issue of spilling Mary’s royal blood. The veneration Elizabeth claims from her people in this speech (see, e.g., CW 186) is triply violated by Mary, whose plots scorn their blood relations, their implicit sisterhood as women of royal blood, and even their common gender. Despite her obvious position of control, the Queen continues to assert both her willingness to suffer on behalf of her people and her victimization by Mary in order to justify the latter’s unconditional end. She acknowledges that a queen’s blood is indeed a potent symbol as she anticipates opponents’ forthcoming criticisms with her second reply to Parliament’s petitions urging execution, version two, 39 delivered 24 November 1586: What will they not now say when it shall be spread that for the safety of her life, a maiden queen could be content to spill the blood even of her own kinswoman? I may therefore full well complain that any man should think me given to cruelty, whereof I am so guiltless and innocent as I should slander God if I say He gave me so vile a mind. Yea, I protest I am so far from it that for mine own life, I would not touch her. Neither hath my care been so much bent how to prolong mine, as how to preserve both, which I am right sorry is made so hard—yea, so impossible. I am not so void of judgment as not to see mine own peril; nor yet so ignorant as not to know it were in nature a foolish course to cherish a sword to cut mine own throat; nor so careless as not to weigh that my life daily is in hazard. (CW 201–2)

The Queen is careful not to say that she would give her life for Mary’s; she reports considering how to preserve either “mine own life” or “both,” but not Mary’s alone. The image of Mary’s blood is followed by denials of harmful intent (“that any man should think me given

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to cruelty,” “I would not touch her”) that are quickly displaced by a multiplication of the threats to Elizabeth’s own life (“mine own peril,” the perversity of persisting in protecting “a sword to cut mine own throat”). The confidence of her arguments assures her listeners she is neither “void of judgment,” “ignorant,” or “careless”; she is acting solely out of self-defense, and Queen Mary’s blood must be spilled to protect the blood of “maiden queen” Elizabeth. The rhetorical program of emotional and political distancing Elizabeth implemented as her solution to the manifold problems posed by Mary was assisted by the exposure of political plots like the Babington Conspiracy, which posed irrefutable dangers to her well-being. 40 Early in Mary’s exile, Elizabeth replies to a series of letters from her cousin on 1 February 1572, scolding her that “it is not the manner to obtain good things with evil speeches, nor benefits with injurious challenges, nor to get good to yourself with doing evil to another” (CW 130). What is here a petulant reminder to Mary that she is only as powerful as Elizabeth allows her to be, becomes in time the aphorism that seals Mary’s fate (and those of many other enemies of Elizabeth): there can be no “good to yourself with doing evil to” the Queen. She commands Sir Amyas Paulet, Mary’s keeper, in August 1586 to “Let your wicked mistress know how with hearty sorrow her vile deserts compels these orders, and bid her from me ask God forgiveness for her treacherous dealings towards the saver of her life many years, to the intolerable peril of her own. And yet not content with so many forgivenesses, must fall again so horribly, far passing woman’s thought, much more a princess’, instead of excusing, whereof not one can serve, it being so plainly confessed by the actors of my guiltless death” (CW 284). Mary becomes the lowest of the low (“wicked,” “vile,” “treacherous”), while Elizabeth, by virtue of her public attempts to avert the very conclusion she has rhetorically assisted, elevates herself to the position of “saver” (obviously cueing association as well with “savior”). Her rhetorical position here also allows her to voice the moral outrage that would have been expressed by her subjects if she had been murdered, since the “actors of my guiltless death” had every intention of succeeding in their conspiracies. Indeed, in confessing Mary’s complicity, they rationalize Elizabeth’s decision to join her cousin’s condemnation to their own. Perhaps the most telling document marking the imminent execution of Mary is a letter to Henri III of France, dated January 1587, whose ambassador, Monsieur de Bellievre, had unsuccessfully attempted to plead Mary’s case to the Queen: “My God! how could you be so unreasonable as to reproach the injured party, and to compass the death of an innocent one by allowing her to become the

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prey of a murderess? . . . For, that you should be angry at my saving my own life, seems to me the threat of an enemy, which, I assure you, will never put me in fear, but is the shortest way to make me dispatch the cause of so much mischief” (183). Vulnerability (“the injured party,” “the prey of a murderess”) is again turned to strength, and the French King’s defense is itself recoded as an act of aggression which further justifies the very decision it sought to prevent. Grindal and Ascham astutely recognized their pupil’s scholarly aptitude for language and rhetoric, admiring her for her enthusiastic devotion to study. 41 Yet they were also witnessing an apprenticeship in statecraft, the development of a monarch for whom the word would be her most effective political tool, and her most potent political weapon. Not surprisingly, analysis of her personal discourse of rhetorical violence exposes to us the very acute edge and temper of that tool and weapon.

3 Tragic Past and Present Danger: Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie B y the time Anne Dowriche published her long narrative poem in poulter’s measure, The French Historie. That is: A lamentable Discourse of three of the chiefe, and most famous bloodie broiles that haue happened in France for the Gospel of Iesus Christ (1589), 1 constructed from details found in Jean de Serres’s The Three Partes of Commentaries, Containing the whole and perfect discourse of the Ciuill warres of Fraunce, vnder the raignes of Henry the second, Frances the second, and of Charles the ninth as translated by cleric Thomas Tymme (1574), Queen Elizabeth I and her Protestant regime had been addressing Catholic threats from within and without for the better part of a decade. Royal proclamation 650, “Suppressing Invasion Rumors,” was passed on 15 July 1580 to warn the nation “that the Pope, the King of Spain, and some other princes are accorded to make a great army to invade this realm of England.” 2 Plots to replace Elizabeth with her Scots cousin surfaced regularly over the next few years: a Catholic named John Somerville rode out of Warwickshire in 1583 on a self-proclaimed crusade to assassinate the queen; in 1584, Francis Throgmorton was executed for plotting a Spanish invasion of England, and Spain proved to be complicit in the murder of William of Orange; it was revealed in 1585 that the papal secretary of state had approved the removal of the English monarch; and 1586 saw the failure of the Babington plot. 3 The French Historie, drafted while these events were unfolding, 4 recognizes that the nation at the end of the 1580s seemed poised for significant retributive responses despite the successes of the armada year, and hence announces in its dedication that it contains “manie things for comfort worthie the considering, and for policie the obseruing” (A2v). That is, while expressing a partisan Protestant perspective, Dowriche designs her narrative reconstruction of recent sectarian persecutions in France as a warning to English readers against supporting a similarly divisive and self-destructive course of action. The poet dedicates The French Historie to “Pearse Edgecombe” (Piers Edgecumbe [DNB]), her brother, and links herself to him in a cautionary couplet that introduces the discourse of violence she uses throughout her text for rhetorical effect: “The sharpest EDGE will soonest PEARSE and COME vnto AN end. / Yet DOWT not, but be RICHE in hope, and take that I doo send” (A3). The tone 67

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of The French Historie’s front matter is consistently didactic, founded on Paul’s admonition to the church at Ephesus to “Let no corrupt communication procede out of your mouths: but that which is good, to the vse of edifying” (Ephesians 4:29), 5 and the author reiterates that her “onelie purpose in collecting & framing this worke, was to edifie, comfort, and stirre vp the godlie mindes” (A3v) of readers. Dowriche asks her brother, in an acrostic poem built from his name, 6 to “Grieue not the Spirit that warneth you great dangers for to flie” (A3), and in so doing introduces the reader to “the nature and qualities of those vertues or villanies” that she has “depainted for them that will seeke for it” (A4; my emphasis). This strategy allows her both to speak intimately to the reader with the concern of a sister for her brother, and to encourage an allegorical reading of the poem, reinforcing this with the modest quatrain, “To the Reader that is friendlie to Poetrie”: “What so thou be that readst my Booke, / Let wit so weight my will; / That due regard maie here supplie / The want of learned Skill” (A4v). This chapter will demonstrate that within the rhetorical construct of a loving sister embedding wisdom in a cautionary narrative to be decoded through careful reading, Anne Dowriche presents an explicitly feminist poetic to express her perspectives on spiritual conflict; employs rhetorical violence as amplification to compel reader reflection on those perspectives and the costs of disregarding them; exploits an overtly theatrical structure to aid her presentation of a revisionist or alternative historical model for England; and finally suggests that with “due regard” the reader may recognize the political dangers associated with a punitive position toward spiritual conflict and become part of a national voice in opposition to sectarian violence.

“To procure comfort to the afflicted”: A Feminist Semiotic A caveat in the dedicatory letter to her brother, that “If you finde anie thing that fits not your liking, remember I pray, that it is a womans doing” (A2v), has the dual function of arguing that the authorization for presenting her poetic reconstruction of spiritual and political issues is Dowriche’s own feminist aesthetics, and of explicitly identifying her poem as a feminist interpretation of history. In doing so, she employs what Mieke Bal has identified as two important codes within feminist discourse: the “thematic code, when a theme relevant to the relations between the sexes is used as a code, such as love, maternity, or the division of labor,” and the “differential code, when

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sexual difference serves as the point of departure for a fracturing interpretation” that can “bring out into the open the contradictions within a text attributable to a gendered plurality of voices.” 7 To identify her text’s genesis, Dowriche explains that The French Historie was written “for mine owne exercise, being a learner in that facultie,” to “restore againe some credit if I can vnto Poetrie, hauing been defaced of late,” and to “frame to the better liking of some mens fantasies” (A4) the important issues it addresses. Anticipating the charge that her text is overambitious or even audacious in its scope and criticism, she employs Bal’s “thematic code” to contextualize her efforts as distinctly feminine—compassionate and maternal: she argues that her text seeks “to procure comfort to the afflicted, strength to the weake, courage to the faint hearted, and patience vnto them that are persecuted” (A4v). At the same time, Dowriche displays Bal’s “differential code” as the method of grounding her narrative in values that are just as distinctly feminine, but that also frequently conflict with the male political and aesthetic perspectives of her source, Thomas Tymme’s translation of de Serres (which, in Book Ten, includes translation of François Hotman’s De furoribus Gallicis, horrenda & indigna [London, 1573]). Her poem is framed by the narration of a Frenchman (presumably de Serres) who is cordially asked by an Englishman (presumably Tymme) to “prepare / The cause of all these bloody broils in verse” (ll. 115– 16) without the slightest hint of traditional enmity between their nations. This makes it possible for the poet’s authorial presence to recede in the initial phase of the narrative (through the fiction that it is the Frenchman’s story rather than her own) while also securing an amiable exchange as narrative pretext. Similarly, Dowriche prevents her poem from serving as either a provocation or chronicle of class war by balancing descriptions of the Guisan faction with accounts of altruistic aristocrats (“Yet God to bring to pass the work he did intend, / Did also raise some noble men the poorer to defend” [ll. 153–54]) and of Protestant “women of great parentage, which were with shame reviled / (Of them whom fury led) to prison as they went” (ll. 250–51). Accounts of violence in the poem are most frequently provided in support of a martyr trope that celebrates the heroic suffering of oppressed Protestants while insisting that any call for reprisal would compromise their sacrifices. Thus there is a “differential code” employed here to distinguish Dowriche’s narrative from male accounts like John Foxe’s sensationalist accounts of antiProtestant atrocities in Acts and Monuments or Christopher Marlowe’s portrait of the Duke of Guise as apocalyptic horror in The Massacre at Paris. 8

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The two codes seem to merge when Dowriche associates heroism with the unwillingness of certain individuals to pursue revenge for wrongs done to them, at once a feminized ethos communicated through a thematic code, and a passive rather than aggressive response that is signalled as such through a differential code. The Protestants imprisoned as part of the St. James Street persecution are united in their resistance to violence, “And for the King and commons all they prayed with watery eyes: / That God would yet withhold his just revenging hand / And bless with perfect truth and peace, their king and eke their land” (ll. 274–76). The connotation of emotional extremity (“with watery eyes”) adds poignance to the prayer against vengeance, and creates reader anticipation for the ultimate test of the characters’ resolve, their actual execution. Stripped naked, yet ecstatic with conviction (“ ‘O welcome happy pain’ ” [l. 417]), the martyrs cite the biblical archetype of male violence and revenge in order to resist it: The blood of Abel cried for vengeance to the Lord, Which fell on Cain and all his seed (whom men and earth abhorred), From which the Lord defend both you, and eke our land; O Lord, revenge not this our wrong, but stay thy furious hand, And give them yet some space for to repent this thing, And for our death we do forgive both them and eke our king. (ll. 427–32)

To support this signification, Dowriche provides little detail of the actual execution, noting only that their prayers continued “Till that the flame had stayed their voice, and body burned to dust” (l. 442). The same patterns appear in the second portion of the poem, treating the condemnation, trial, and execution of Protestant senator Annas Burgaeus, as he also wishes the King well (ll. 700–702) and forgives his persecutors (E2). The poet also has him encourage his reluctant executioner: “‘Why therefore doo we staie? Come hangman doo thy part; / Thy fact in this, loe heere I doo forgiue with all my heart.’ / And this he did repeat, ‘Come hangman doo the deed’; / Till that the stoutest heart that heard, for griefe began to bleed” (E4). The implications of the choices made by Dowriche here become clear when her depictions are juxtaposed with Tymme’s—where he describes Burgaeus as the de facto speaker for an entire group of Huguenots being executed “(which libertie other of the faithfull had not when they came to suffer, hauing their tongues first cut out of their heads)” (F2), his own death is described dispassionately: “And being strangled, hee was cast into the fire” (F2v). Where the male source emphasizes the horror of the inflicted violence, coding the

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Protestants as stoic victims, Dowriche recodes execution as sacrifice and worship, and empowers them with the gift of mercy to their enemies. Her objective is to have the reader share the response of the characters who witness Burgaeus’s death, to imagine the ache of grief that accompanies recognition of the destruction of a human life. 9 In a complementary pattern, Dowriche focuses on individuals who refuse to participate in acts of partisan violence so she can demonize the actions of those who do participate in them. When De Nance, captain of the guard, “commanded was to kill” the Count de Rochefoucault, a prominent Protestant nobleman, during the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, “he most stoutly did refuse this guiltless blood to spill” (ll. 1741–42). Reasoning that there are consequences for his actions whichever course he chooses (“The King does threaten death, and God does threaten hell” [l. 1759]), the captain boldly disobeys his orders: To kill the uncondemned man it is no charge of mine; To slay my deadly foe except there were some cause I would not yield, much less my friend against our sacred laws. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . De Nance to kill his friend no wight shall ever see, Though for refusal he were sure beheaded for to be. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Look well therefore, O King, before you leap too far, Lest in the end this testy scab do breed a lasting scar. (ll. 1762–64, 1773–74, 1783–84)

De Nance becomes the conduit for an ethos of considered nonviolence that is heroically reiterated by his readiness to die before violating it—though the poet balances her own enhancement of his persona with the documented devastation of the 1572 massacre by dutifully recording De Nance’s inability to save Rochefoucault (ll. 1787– 94) or the unfortunate Monsieur de Pilles (I2v-I3v) from being slain. The passage’s concluding homily, direct advice to the monarch to resist a policy of repression lest a “testy scab” become a “lasting scar,” is part of a systemic strategy employed by Dowriche throughout the poem to portray retribution pejoratively. 10 In support of her antiviolence semiotic, Dowriche assigns agency for just retribution to God, rather than suggesting that individuals can or should pursue private vengeance. She applies a thematic code of feminist values and aesthetics to evoke reader sympathy for the plight of brutalized characters, but accompanies this with a differential code that rejects what playwrights of the popular theater had already embodied in the figure of revengers like Kyd’s Hieronimo as a gendered impulse. In the example of the doomed Admiral Gaspard

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de Coligny, for example, where a masculinist narrative might focus on the havoc the character can wreak before dying, or in achieving an analogous rhetorical effect through oratory bravado and rhetorical violence before succumbing to death, Dowriche’s feminized version of the character is more concerned about the safety of his friends (ll. 1590–91) than about his own, and sees his own fate as less important than Catholic attempts “by falsehood and by sword” to achieve “the rasing of that truth, which they are loath to see” (ll. 1598, 1596). Rather than rally his supporters with calls for retaliation, the Admiral asserts “Yet shall these tyrants not escape the Lord’s revenging hand” (l. 1604) and follows with prayer that God vindicate the faith implicit in his words: “Let not these tyrants longer, Lord, thy servants put to shame, / Lest they do proudly brag, and say within their heart: / ‘Where is the God whom they do serve, that now should take their part?’ ” (ll. 1640–42). For Dowriche, this active exhibition of faith expresses the difference between victim and martyr, though she also exploits the semantics of the point at which they intersect. The “famous and godlie preacher” Masson de Rivers, fated to be murdered by the “bloodie Curre Monsorrell ” (K2) in Angiers at the king’s command, kisses his wife, “her sorow to repell, / With her his babes he did imbrace, and bade them al farewel, / But Lord what rolling teares, what shrikes and piteous cries / Betweene the wife and louing babes were sent to airie Skies” (K3v). The pathos of this image is made complete by description of Monsorrell aiming “his readie dagg” at “Masson kneeling downe, content his life to leaue; / The bullet meeklie to his breast from Pistoll did receaue” (K3v). Dowriche’s conclusion to de Rivers’s personal tragedy both gives it meaning and directs its signification to prevent it becoming a pretext for reprisal: “We see what worthie men the Papists haue destroid, / God grant vs grace that doo remaine their treasons to auoide” (K3v). The “worthie” minister, who dies “with quiet heart as meeke as anie childe” (K3v), authenticates with the ultimate sincerity those values expressed through the thematic code of the poet’s discourse, while the aggression of the Papists, condemned by the poet as inhumane, functions in the differential code of that same semiotic of antiviolence to signify them as monstrous and utterly alien.

“No sex could pity find”: Rhetorical Violence as Technique Dowriche’s application of rhetorical violence as amplification in The French Historie generally serves three interdependent strategies to

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affect reader response: by evoking fear or pity, by triggering recall of turbulent history, and by provoking indignation or disgust. The proto-Gothic opening of the poem creates an atmosphere suggestive of danger and terror (“In shrilling voice, and mournful tunes, methought I heard one cry; / Which sudden fear so dashed my blood and senses all” [ll. 2–3]); what prompts reader fear, however, is that the first-person narrator, thinking perhaps “thieves had robbed and cast some man aside” (l. 7), runs to offer help regardless of personal risk. The potential for violence to this unselfish individual raises the same concerns in the reader as those associated with the imprisonment of the St. James Street Protestants: “The thieves and bloody murderers did find more favour there, / For they that death deserved were taken from their clink, / And in their cold and ugly pits which breathed a deadly stink / These men were thrust and bound” (ll. 254–57). Dowriche honors the Aristotelian definition of tragedy in her efforts here to elicit reader pity and fear for these characters, and like Aristotle sees that the point of doing so is ultimately to achieve the catharsis of those emotions. Annas Burgaeus castigates his fellow senators (“You racke & teare Gods knowen truth, not caring what befall” [E3v]) not because he wants to stir them to additional violence, but because he wishes to purge their temptation to act violently: “But what; me thinkes I see the teares tril downe your cheeke? / What, haue I spoken that which now your conscience doth mislike?” (E3v). Dowriche encourages the reader to feel fear and pity for the plight of the targets of Catholic persecution in order to amplify the shame and loss that must accompany any reflection on the motives and the human cost of that action. Dowriche reports “To the Reader” that “for the more terror vnto the wicked,” she “diligentlie collected the great plagues and iust iudgments of God shewed against the persecutors in euery seuerall History,” and “amplified them by the like iudgments against sinners out of the word and other histories” (A4). Her technique mines the biblical and early modern histories of violence associated with religious persecution and uses examples from them to stimulate responses from her readers that are cued by their own memories of pain and of rhetorically “painful” lessons. Mary Carruthers has noted that “violence seems to be a recurring preoccupation, almost a mnemotechnical principle,” among traditional memory theorists, and observes that the technique of employing “ ‘excessive’ images for secure remembering” often “includes making very bloody, gory, violent ‘imagines agentes.’ ” 11 The French Historie depends in many examples upon violent details from biblical narrative—with sectarian spins to serve Dowriche’s didactic purposes—to trigger memory

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of their conventional cultural associations. Aligning Protestantism with faith in the monotheist god of the Old Testament in order to connote Catholicism as its demonized opposite, Dowriche’s French narrator declares that France, like “Juda land,” has “for wooden gods God’s lively image spilled, / And with streams of Christian blood the streets and canals filled” (ll. 67, 69–70). The lines allude to passages like Deuteronomy 4:25–28 and Isaiah 44:13–20 that condemn the worship of “wooden gods” as futile and self-destructive; 12 to adopt the Catholics’ brutal tactics of persecution, then, would be tantamount to sharing their faith and sharing in the punishment they must eventually receive from God. With a similar interpretive spin, she versifies a portion of Christ’s words in Matthew 10:34–36 (ll. 158–60) as a statement of intrafamilial conflict, 13 implying that civil unrest is necessarily a facet of the Christian legacy, something to be accepted as concomitant to Protestant faith rather than as something to contest or avenge. Prompting recall of much more contemporary history, the third section of the poem prefaces the account of de Coligny’s murder with a specific invocation of martyrology tradition: “Now haue you heard before, of faggot, fire, and sword / Inhaunst by Sathan, for to quell Gods truth and blessed word” (F2). The tools of persecution, amplified by association with Satan, are coded as signifiers of the murder of innocents, urging the reader to resist the temptation ever to call for their use in the same capacity. The “very bloody, gory, violent” images that Carruthers identifies as particularly memorable are also incorporated into The French Historie to guide reader response by stimulating emotions of indignation or even disgust at their details of human cruelty. Randall Martin has argued that Dowriche’s “sometimes gruesome focus on physical torment” functions to “clarify human motives and generate a poignant sense of lived sacrifice more engaging than the chronicles’ loosely digested details,” 14 but this amplification tactic seems less important for its didactic lucidity than for its immediate, visceral impact. The murder of Admiral de Coligny and its aftermath are amplified through graphic violence to increase narrative momentum as the final portion of the poem rushes toward its conclusion. The indomitable Admiral survives a sword thrust to the heart, a blow to the head, a pistol shot to the chest, and a sword slash to the thigh before dying (ll. 1652–63)—but this heroism is mocked by the Duke of Guise’s request that his body be thrown down for positive identification: his henchmen “Took up this bloody corse, and so from window cast him out. / Where from his wounded head sprung out so fresh a flood, / That vizard-like his face was all imbrued with gory blood” (ll. 1672–74). Every vicious act of the Guisans contains its internal

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contradictions (murdering to protect an essentially Christian faith [ll. 1694–98]; offering for identification a body that becomes less identifiable in the process), and rather than serving as the culmination of sectarian violence, the mutilation of the Admiral’s corpse instead provides the model for mass murder. Guisans Cut off the bleeding head (imbrued with reeking blood) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . His hands cut off by some, by some his secret parts, Declares what hate to shining light lies hid in blinded hearts. His hacked and mangled corpse by space of certain days Was dragged by rascals all along the streets and filthy ways. At length this rustic rage, as fury thought it meet, At common gallows of the town did hang him by the feet. (ll. 1713, 1717–22)

While the details themselves are drawn directly from Tymme (10: D2– D2v), Dowriche explicitly announces the signification of this sparagmos (wherein severed body parts “declare” hate for Protestants and their faith), and the French Catholics transform it into ritual practiced upon all of their victims: “they first cut off their head / And after fiercely pierced with wounds both great and deep; / Which being done like cruel curs they throw them on a heap” (ll. 1730– 32). 15 The result is utter dehumanization of victims and victimizers, and Dowriche wants the reader to recoil from the horror that “They spared none they knew, no sex could pity find, / The rueful cry of tender babes could not assuage their mind” (ll. 1839–40).

“An angel strake him from the Lord”: Citing Cyclical Violence Anticipating that reader fear/pity, memory, or indignation/disgust can develop into anger, precisely the kind of reaction her text is designed to mediate against, Dowriche turns once again to biblical and historical examples for evidence that whatever immediate gains may be achieved through it, for “euerie proud persecutor” (A4), violence is always answered with violence. Montmorency, the Constable of France, a “looking-glass” reflecting “the end of swelling pride,” boasts that “if he returned sound” from facing the forces of Philip II in 1557, “He would not cease till he had quashed Geneva to the ground” (ll. 363–66); Dowriche portrays his failure as the inevitable price of persecution: “So he that lately swore against the Lord to fight

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/ Was taken captive by the foe, his army put to flight” (ll. 369–70). Under the subheading “The iudgements of the Lord shewed vpon these bloodie persecuters in this first outrage, by the example of manie the like out of the Scriptures,” Dowriche includes a series of twenty-two biblical examples (with scriptural documentation in the margins, C4-C4v; cf. ll. 1001–22 for a similar series), proceeds to a survey of Roman persecutors, 16 and then turns to pseudo-journalism to cite “real” examples that are “documented” with corroborating details or amplified with editorial remarks: A [a]Iudge that sentence gaue against his knowen faith, An angel strake him from the Lord with sharp & sodein death. Another Iudge that was now sicke and like to die, Cride out; [b]I see my iudgement iust, for that vile caitiffe I By mallice haue been faine Gods people for to kill: Who praie, and liue most godlie bent according to his will. Two [c ]others being cheefe in murder that was past, By sodeine death in view of all like veangeance now do tast. And other [d]two which now of blood had dronke their fill, As they came from this murder, they did one the other kill. [a] A Iudge that gaue sentence, was striken with sodaine death. [b] O the dedlie sting of a guiltie conscience. [c ] Two others cruell in the former slaughter, died sodainlie in the sight of all men. [d] Other two as they returned from the murder, fell at contention, and at last were slaine one of an other. (D1)

In these four examples, Dowriche reiterates her central thesis concerning sectarian violence: that exacting penalties for crimes against religion lies solely in God’s jurisdiction; that punishment for persecution cuts across class lines; and that violence is ultimately selfdestructive since it initiates a cycle that culminates in divine retribution. The paraphrased repetition in the first, third and fourth notes signals that this is a rhetorical strategy, apparently intended to assert the authenticity of the examples. The transfer from thirdperson to first-person perspective in the second example makes it more immediate and personal, and Dowriche takes advantage of the shift to insert her own first person voice in commentary on it. The language of this ten-line passage is overdetermined with violent referents (“strake,” “sharp,” “sodain death” [twice], “mallice,” “kill” [twice], “murder” [twice], “vengeance,” “blood . . . dronke”) that are also reinforced by the repetition in the glosses. In his Arte of English Poesie published the same year as the French Historie, George

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Puttenham recommends this tactic, calling it “Emphasis, or the Renforcer,” and declaring that “one notable meane to affect the minde, is to inforce the sense of any thing by a word of more than ordinary efficacie.” 17 To impress on her readers the essential democracy of divine punishment of persecutors—to prevent the argument that insurrection is justified when certain individuals are effectively so powerful that they exist outside the law—Dowriche attributes special significance to the deaths of the monarchs Henry II and Charles IX. 18 Following his condemnation of Annas Burgaeus, the “youthly King” Henry decides to “show his manhood and his might” (ll. 1030–31) at a tournament held to celebrate his marriage, and chooses his captain of the guard, Montgomery, as his opponent: “Where charging with their spears, and forcing might and main, / A splinter pierced the Prince’s eye and ran unto his brain. / The King, with sudden wound and bleeding much dismayed, / Within the next adjoining house to bed he was conveyed” (ll. 1037–40). To amplify the tragic message here, Dowriche reenacts the fatal incident once more and recodes the role of Montgomery in it: This heavy hap befell (as many men have told) Near to the place wherein as then Burgeus was in hold; And many did observe that he did kill the King Which was commanded to the jail Burgeus for to bring. The King did often brag those eyes of his should see Burgeus burned; but lo, the Lord did alter that decree, For ere Burgeus was unto the fire led, Montgomery had those eyes of his thrust clean out of his head. (ll. 1049–56)

Montgomery is the unwitting tool of God’s vengeance, and further justification of the king’s death is directed not merely at his sentencing of the innocent Burgaeus, but at his pride in having done so (“The King did often brag those eyes of his should see / Burgeus burned”). Hence his divinely decreed punishment is not simply death, but death at the hands of a trusted follower who thereby ensures that he cannot follow through on his cruel boast. The poetic justice of his death provides the model for Dowriche’s grotesque depiction of Charles IX’s punishment “from God’s revenging hand” (l. 2205), which must be proportionately more horrible because of the scale of the 1572 massacre he approved: The ears that would not hear the poor afflicted cry, But greedily to suck their blood would credit every lie,

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sharpening her pen With blood are stopped up that they shall hear no more, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The mouth that would not speak to do his brother good, Instead of words doth vomit out the clots of filthy blood; The nose that did detest of truth the pleasant smell, From filthy heart doth willingly the stinking blood expel. So that we plainly see, that blood for blood does crave, And he shall not escape that seeks his brother’s blood to have. (ll. 2215–17, 2219–24)

This unnatural effluence of blood (“From every part his blood was seen, where blood might issue out” [l. 2208]) is causally connected to “God’s avenging hand,” and completes the cycle of violence initiated by Charles’s complicity in the St. Bartholomew’s Day murders. No opportunity for pejorative signification (or bizarre synaesthesia) is neglected: the king’s ears are vampiric, his mouth vomits “clots of filthy blood,” his nose is a conduit venting his “filthy” heart’s “stinking blood.” However, the dramatic flair of such passages is not simply a product of Dowriche’s message of violence begetting violence, but also the reflection of a systematic strategy to achieve “the more noueltie of the thing” and “so frame [it] to the better liking of some mens fantasies” (A4).

“How these their parts do play”: Writing for the Theater of History One of the surprising discoveries awaiting readers who encounter The French Historie for the first time is Dowriche’s occasional recourse to dramatic structures and allusions, particularly to introduce pending conflicts in the poem. While this may seem unexpected coming from an Elizabethan woman, S. P. Cerasano and Marion WynneDavies have reminded us in their anthology, Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents, that the early modern English theater must be recognized as “a place of freedom for women” who “actually held a proprietary interest in the theatre both as influential spectators and . . . as financial investors.” 19 Additionally, if we agree that Dowriche is crafting a proactive text as she adapts Tymme’s translation, we should not be surprised by any vehicle that serves her didactic objective. Elaine V. Beilin contends that Dowriche adopted a structure that melded fiction, poetry, and drama to represent history because she was “dissatisfied with a version that would not move her readers to consider the particular motives and choices of the historical figures.” 20 This is consistent with her dedication’s stated intention

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of employing “noueltie” to make the text more intriguing, but another reading may be drawn from the first appearance in the poem of a direct theatrical allusion. In a text concerned self-consciously with interpreting history for its readers, Dowriche has her narrator challenge previous historical accounts of the French persecutions: “Now let us see the end, how these their parts do play, / And mark where all things fall not out as we have heard them say” (ll. 217– 18; cf. l. 443). With this, she announces her intention of enacting a new interpretation of history in the poem, of presenting something other than a chronicle of atrocities or traditional martyrology to her readers. In shaping the semantics of her history, Dowriche encodes the results of the French persecutions as verification of Protestant truth (“God will not long maintain their reign that shall his truth deny” [l. 694]) and of Catholic evil. And in restricting her theatrical allusions to disingenuous characters like Queen Mother Catherine de Medici, her son, Charles IX, the Duke of Guise, and even Satan, she participates in what Jonas Barish calls the “antitheatrical prejudice” that sees performers as Proteus figures or chameleons, “emblems of cunning or shallow inconstancy” (109–10). Satan, acting as director, tells the Catholic nobles to “ ‘make show’ ” (l. 1097) as though desiring an end to sectarian conflicts, though “ ‘The King, as chiefest man, this play must first begin / By loving letters, words, and cheer at first to bring them in’ ” (ll. 1099–1100) and “ ‘The Mother Queen in this must also play her part, / That no suspect of treason may remain within their heart’ ” (ll. 1117–18). With these characters established as “players,” Dowriche announces the play proper: But here the prologue ends, and here begins the play, For bloody minds resolvèd quite to use no more delay. The Mother Queen appears now first upon the stage, Where like a devilish sorceress with words demure and sage The King she calls aside, with other trusty mates Into a close and secret place, with whom she now debates The great desire she had to quit them all from care, In planting long a bloody plot, which now she must declare. (ll. 1393–1400)

While the theatrical allusions assist Dowriche in guiding the reader’s imaginative staging of this scene, they also hint at her larger strategy to recode the persecutors as diabolical puppets (with Catherine, “a devilish sorceress,” acting as the intermediary linking Satan to Charles and his nobles). Their dehumanization is made explicit at the tolling of the tocsin that signals “When as this raging rout this

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murder should begin, / Which they performed, as though they had not men, but monsters been” (ll. 1705–6; see also 1531–36). What makes these actors “monsters” is not their own natures, but the fact that they have succumbed to the devil’s influence. Theligny, son-inlaw to the Admiral, faces his own death by recognizing the tragedy that Charles IX is not “acting” his appropriate role: “‘It grieues me for to see this sad and irksome daie, / Wherein so great a famous King, a traitors part shuld play’ ” (I2). To ascribe an agency to this theatrical seduction, then, Dowriche pulls the curtain wide—to reveal Satan, as character and influence, manipulating events from the wings.

The Devil’s Design: “This is no new device” Dowriche acknowledges the danger of being misread or of having her textual intentions “interpreted” when she describes the St. James Street group requesting in writs that the King investigate their case, only to have insider opponents convince him “their writings were all lies” (l. 346). At the same time, she demonstrates that semantics are sufficiently mutable that loss can be reconfigured as gain, as when aged Protestant merchant Francis Collute, seeing death imminent, recodes murder for himself and his sons as a blessing: “It is the Lord alone, which will restore again / A better life, if for his law by death we suffer pain; / Come, let us gladly give our throats unto the knife” (ll. 2043–45). This dual recognition of shifting signification as threat and as tool guides the poet as she seeks to assign culpability in her narrative. The dilemma, however, is that she must carefully avoid labeling Catholics as the enemy to be conquered if tranquillity is to be restored to an England plagued by anti-Elizabeth plots. Her solution is to assign accountability directly to Satan, and she explains in “To the Reader” that each of the narrative’s three sections illustrates a different threat posed by God’s adversary. The first reveals “the prompt facilitie and readines of Sathans ministers to put in execution anie kind of wickednesse”; the second reveals the “power, maiestie, & dignities of the Diuell” in “seeming to the outward appearance to weild the Truth” and “in suppressing the strongest that dare openly to withstand him”; and the third exposes the “policie and crafte of Sathan . . . under the shadow of trust, to exercise tyrannie”: “We had need therefore to be watchfull, strong, and wise” (A3v). It is in her portrait of Satan that Dowriche manages to support her own compassionate, feminist agenda by turning her rhetorical attack on the quintessential symbol of masculine destruction. The textual legerdemain of (mis)directing reader focus to Satan as

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the evil behind the persecutions transfers blame for initiating sectarian violence away from the French Catholics and suggests that such widescale persecution is so intrinsically inhumane that it must have had diabolical origins. 21 Henry II may be culpable for his decisions, but it is Satan who forces his hand by chastising his courts’ judges as “too remisse: / They are not sharpe inough to shred appearing ill, / They suffer impes of Luthers sect too much to haue their will” (D1v). When conscience-stricken members of the Senate warn that religious persecutions will be punished by God, it is Satan who dispatches two agents to misreport this opposition as treason to the king: “The limbes of Pluto thus bloody went, / Egidius and Minardus were fit hounds for the sent” (D2). At Annas Burgaeus’s sentencing, “Sathan did reioyce his matters framde so well; / Whose bloodie minde had cast the plot Christ Iesus to expel.” Though the innocent senator attempts a series of appeals, “Yet Sathan seeking for his blood this thing could not preuaile” (E1). Burgaeus recognizes the devil’s hand in the Protestant suppression (E2v) and bravely refuses to save his life by shifting allegiance. Even though the Duke of Anjou recommends the treacherous Cossin to serve as Admiral de Coligny’s guard, this “bloodie practise” is revealed by the poet as “Sathan’s art” of “cloaked guile” (G3) to transform a “trusty keeper” (l. 1576) into a murderer (ll. 1581–82). Dowriche does not portray the devil as the adversary defeated by Christ in the wilderness, but rather as the successful architect of mass murder; this is the enemy she warns her reader “to be watchfull, strong, and wise” (A3) against—not the European Catholics manipulated to perpetrate the devil’s will. Supporting her rhetorical efforts to shift blame is a resurgence in the potency of Satan’s presence in cultural mythology across Europe, one of the unintended products of the Reformation. Jeffrey Burton Russell explains that “Protestant emphasis on the Bible as the sole source of authority meant renewed confidence in New Testament teaching on Satan. Moreover, because of the Protestants’ fear of witchcraft and despite their enthusiasm for pruning out traditions they considered unrooted in Scripture, they accepted virtually all of medieval diabology.” 22 Acting as chief agent of chaos, Satan rallies his minions with strategies of subversion, including misinformation and innuendo (ll. 180–83), reports of conspiracy and intended regicide (ll. 187–90), ambushes (ll. 197–98), and flattery (ll. 201–4). Among more generalized rumors of depravity (ll. 185–86), “new invented lies” (l. 284) are spread that “men and women both together did resort / To match themselves, for to fulfill a stinking filthy sport” (ll. 289–90) of lust and gluttony, “And how among the rest to work their wicked will, / Their usage was (O shameless lie!) their infants

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for to kill” (ll. 295–96). 23 Anne Llewellyn Barstow has noted that gynocentric crimes like infanticide and witchcraft “often overlapped,” 24 and that even a woman’s “admission of attempted abortion was sufficient to condemn her.” 25 Dowriche takes this satanically connotative combination from popular culture, applied initially to accuse the Huguenots, and recodes female defamation as a male condemnation when the Cardinal of Lorraine dissuades a dying Henry II from repealing his ruling against Burgaeus: “But Elymas the witch does spend his cursed wind / From such remorse to keep in thrall the King’s afflicted mind” (1045–46). With verbal sorcery, the Cardinal aborts the mercy Henry II is struggling to deliver. Satan is thus a practical tool for some gendered subversion of Dowriche’s own. 26 Satan’s semiotic relationship to the text is also embedded in the poem’s emblem (appearing both on the title page and at the conclusion of the text), which displays a naked female figure with a whip hanging down her back, a leaf held in the left hand to cover her genitals, and the motto, “Virescit vulnere veritas” (“It grows to wound Truth”). The question of what, precisely, is wounding Truth is begged until late in the poem, when merchant Francis Collute expresses his belief that the “butchering axe” of persecution that is “Satan’s sword” (ll. 2021–22) is both sent from God and serves, as it has previously in Christian history, to test the resolve of the faithful: “This is no new device which Satan puts in ure,” for “unto Truth belongs both fire, sword, and rack, / And naked Truth hath always tied a whip unto her back” (ll. 2023, 2025–26). That is, it is Truth’s nature to be tried by Satan, a thesis reiterated at the text’s close in a two-stanza poem (“Verity Portrayed by the French Pilgrim”), where the opposition is more precisely explicated as Satan (with his co-agents, “malicious men”) against feminine Truth. As the advocate of all that is vulnerable, Truth must strive “ ‘Gainst Satan, Sin, and Adam’s fleshly seed; / Reproving wrongs, bewailing worldlings’ need” (ll. 4–5). To do so, however, is necessarily to challenge any social, political, and spiritual hegemony that it maintained by violence or the threat of it. The World reproved, in rage attempts her wrack, Satan assists, malicious men devise Torments for Truth, bind scourges at her back, Exclaim against her with blasphemous cries, Condemning her, exalting earthly lies, Yet no despair or pain can cause her cease, She wounded, springs, bedecked with crown of Peace. (ll. 8–14)

In this particular allegory of good versus evil, it is more important to

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Dowriche that Truth is a woman than that she is specifically Protestant. If she wishes to speak to a feminine or feminized readership and to encourage resistance to any policy that condemns Catholics unilaterally, her insistence on continuing a policy of peaceful protest (“Reproving wrongs, bewailing worldlings’ need”) despite the rhetorical wounds of calumny and the physical wounds of persecution, her aims are well-served by the powerful resonance of her depiction of long-suffering, feminine Truth. But what, then, are we to make of the considerably more developed character of the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici, as a figure of evil that rivals Marlowe’s portrait of the Duke of Guise?

“This is a woman’s mind, and thus I think it best”: The Warnings Catherine is unambiguously coded as a demonized figure in The French Historie, whether the reader construes this from the way she “justifies the massacre in terms that sound distantly reminiscent of Lady Macbeth” 27 or from reading her in the larger context of “an international Catholic conspiracy, ultimately motivated by Satan, funded by the pope, and manifested politically in such tyrants” 28 as the Queen Mother. She proves herself versed in Machiavellian tactics when pledging “By treason joined with flattery” to entrap the Huguenots “in her gin” (l. 210), and sends a false message of reconciliation and mutual amity to the Admiral (though the “message being done, the Admirall as wise, / Within himselfe did halfe suspect the plot of this deuise” [F3v]). 29 Indeed, if Machiavelli’s philosopy “depreciates traditional female qualities such as trust, dependence, and emotion, while praising male self-reliance, independence of will, and physical aggression,” 30 then we are viewing Catherine through a Machiavellian lens when she cries at her nobles, “ ‘What shame is this that I (a woman by my kind) / Need thus to speak, or pass you men in valour of the mind? / For here I do protest, if I had been a man, / I had myself before this time this murder long began’” (ll. 1433– 36). We have already seen how Queen Elizabeth I strove to create a dual image both of vulnerability and of “male self-reliance, independence of will, and physical aggression” through the rhetoric of her own discourse of violence. In the wake of the assassination attempts against her and the looming question of how best to deal with such threats, Dowriche creates a dominating Queen Mother to suggest the dangers of moving too far in the direction of masculinized response, most particularly toward exercising “physical aggression.”

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By the time Dowriche published The French Historie, Elizabeth I had already confirmed the execution of her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, as an unavoidable casualty of Catholic attempts to usurp the English throne. Thinking of the future of French Catholicism, Queen Mother Catherine is encouraged once the Admiral, “our mightiest foe,” lies “wounded in his bed,” the “captains captive are, the King of Navarre sure,” and “The Prince of Conde with the rest that mischief did procure, / Are close within our walls, we have them in a trap” (ll. 1407, 1409–11). She sees violence as the necessary means to an end, and justifies the murder of Huguenot leaders as a cure for the ailing body politic: “Cut off therefore the head of this infectious sore, / So may you well assure yourselves this bile will rise no more” (ll. 1427–28). When we consider that Catherine’s line, “If we (to cut off future fear and cause of all debate)” (l. 1414), sounds uncannily like the arguments of Elizabeth’s “The Doubt of Future Foes” (c. 1568–71), and that Dowriche is writing in poulter’s measure, the meter of the queen’s lyric, it is difficult not to ponder the implications of parallels between the real and fictional queens. If Elizabeth’s lyric provides a comprehensive rationale for taking aggressive defensive action, it also lacks any kind of speculation on what public sentiment—or, in a broader sense, of what “history”—may make of such a response. But Dowriche provides this for Catherine: “We need not fear the spot of any cruel fame, / So long as we may feel some ease or profit by the same” (ll. 1417–18). Undeterred by conscience or the concern for future reputation, the only motive that matters to the Queen Mother is immediate gain; hence she boldly concludes, “if we permit these rebels to retire, / We soon shall see by wars again our country set on fire. / This is a woman’s mind, and thus I think it best” (ll. 1453–55). These fateful words could not have avoided reminding Dowriche’s readers that a woman’s mind was also determining political responses to the Catholic threats escalating in England at the end of the 1590s. Elizabeth had already agreed to the execution of blood kin—of what greater aggressive action might she prove capable? Dowriche demonstrates to the reader that the ramifications of royal authorization are profound, and that subjects must do their part to encourage that it is granted and administered prudently. Though he achieves it through a vicious abuse of power, the Duke of Guise is able to carry out his murderous campaign because he has secured the King’s approval to settle the Huguenot matter: “Let pity take no place till rebels all be rid, / Thus saith the King, fear not therefore to do what he does bid” (ll. 1691–92; cf. 1694–98). In the midst of the violence performed in the name of sectarian persecution, Dowriche inserts voices of sanity that call for humane

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consideration or that warn of consequences. De Pilles curses the King and his agents: “How are thy wits bewitcht? what furie doth inrage / Thy tigers heart, that nothing can thy thirst but blood assuage?” (I3). Masson de Rivers accounts himself a loyal subject of the king and begs mercy of Monsorrell, warning him that if he goes through with the murder, “Then in the ende be sure to tast the Lords reuenging ire” (K3). Burgaeus attacks Henry II for “suck[ing] the guiltless blood / Of them you name Lutherans, O King,” when he has no personal contact with, or knowledge of, the persecuted as individuals: “For those whom you do hate and push with heavy hand / In very truth are godly men, the best in all your land, / Whose faith you do not see, whose life you do not know” (ll. 673–74, 677–79; cf. 615–18). When Charles IX pretends not to know about the pending assassination of the Admiral, Dowriche enters the narrative directly with an authorial comment: “O lewd and filthy lie! Unseemly for a king! / What Turk or devil could devise a more unworthy thing” (ll. 1493–94). The French Historie consistently holds Henry II and Charles IX accountable for the consequences of policies designed to target groups of people rather than individuals—even when their decisions are influenced by diabolical and/or Machiavellian coercion—thereby alerting English readers to monitor and to reflect upon the responses of their own monarch. That Dowrich has structured the issue as a matter of concern for all English subjects and not simply as a critique of the monarch is confirmed by a prayer offered by the sympathetic Frenchman narrator: The Lord grant England peace and mercy from above, That from the truth no trouble may their fixed heart remove; With wishèd life and health, Lord, long preserve and keep That noble queen, Elizabeth, chief pastor of thy sheep, And that she may find out and hunt with perfect hate The Popish hearts of feignèd friends before it be too late; And that in woeful France the troubles that we see, To England for to shun the like, may now a warning be; And where our wound is seen as yet so fresh to bleed, Lord grant to England that they may in time take better heed. (ll. 2245–54)

The hope is that “their” (i.e., the English people’s) allegiance to the feminine values of “peace and mercy” associated with Truth/“the truth” will remain strong while the monarch addresses the nation’s problems. The queen is wished longevity and health to enable her to identify and locate state enemies—not with vindictiveness, but with

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“perfect hate,” perfect in the dual sense of absolute rejection (as though there can be no other response to those who wish harm to the monarch and to the church of which she is the head) and of just rebuke, of prosecution rather than persecution, conforming to spiritual, moral, and judicial laws. Dowriche offers her verse history as “a warning” that England may avoid the “troubles” of “woeful France” resulting from widespread participation in sectarian violence. And to make even that positive message as memorable as possible, she embeds it in the image of a bleeding wound, to amplify the dangers attendant on ignoring it.

4 “When this sweet of-spring of thy body dies”: Aemilia Lanyer’s Polemical Passion

A emilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judæorum (1611), a personalized adaptation of dialectic structures culled from “her considerable knowledge of English poetry, her scriptural reading,” her life on the periphery of Queen Elizabeth’s court, and “a familiarity with traditional debate material” on the morality and spirituality of women, 1 displays an impressive array of argumentative strategies specifically designed to serve the female writer. Barbara Lewalski acknowledges the possibility of reading Lanyer’s poetic depiction of Christ’s Passion “as a thin veneer for a subversive feminist statement,” 2 while Lynette McGrath more explicitly argues that Salve Deus Rex Judæorum employs “an acceptably conventional topic or genre to conceal a level of subversive discourse” in which the author “pursues the revolutionary possibility of self-definition.” 3 While the most detailed document on Lanyer’s life remains the personal diary of astrologer Simon Forman, 4 an idiosyncratic view of the poet at best, a significant profile of the author can be extrapolated from her techniques of “self-definition.” More precisely, this chapter will demonstrate that Lanyer accomplishes her assertion of self through exercise of a discourse of rhetorical violence that equates cruelty to Christ with cruelty to women, and situates the material and theoretical locus of personal power in what an individual is willing to sacrifice for the benefit of others. The explicit thesis of Salve Deus Rex Judæorum 5 approaches a reconfiguration of Edward Gosynhill’s in The praise of all women, called Mulierum Paean (c. 1542): “Thus all thing pondered in balance plain, / God favoreth always the femininity.” 6 Where Gosynhill cites the male obligation incurred through women’s function as nurturers or caretakers, and ascribes traditional male noninterference within the domestic sphere not to its triviality but to superior female acumen (“man meddleth no whit / Because the woman hath quicker wit”), 7 Lanyer codes her poem’s polemic on female authority with the accepted signifiers of Christian spirituality, remaining cautious about linking them with unambiguous self-reference. 8 Sir Philip Sidney’s poetic muse tells him to look in his heart and write; Aemilia Lanyer effectively does precisely this, but shields her strategy with a 87

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calculated humility: “But my deare Muse, now whither wouldst thou flie, / Above the pitch of thy appointed straine? / With Icarus thou seekest now to trie, / Not waxen wings, but thy poore barren Braine, / Which farre too weake, these siely lines descrie” (ll. 273–77). As Barbara Bowen has argued, Lanyer is working “to reconceptualize the master narratives of her culture” in “part by defining the collective interests of virtuous womanhood,” 9 and is forced to negotiate culturally gendered boundaries even as she works to transgress or to dissolve them.

“In what meane state his Ancestors have bin”: Challenging Male Hierarchy To provide a foundation for her assertions of the influence and value of women, Lanyer rhetorically weakens the thrall of the existing male social hierarchy through a dual strategy. 10 She argues first that a hierarchical structure is inconsistent with the Christian value system, which argues a common origin for all people: What difference was there when the world began, Was it not Virtue that distinguisht all? All sprang but 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? (“To the Ladie Anne, Countesse of Dorcet” ll. 33–40)

Thus Lanyer also introduces the unlikelihood that any ancestral line can be considered beyond reproach or doubt when considered in the full context of history. To complement this leveling technique, she recodes the royal court, the center of English culture, pejoratively as “That great Enchantresse of weake mindes admir’d, / Whose allbewitching charmes so pleasing be / To worldly wantons; and too much desir’d / Of those that care not for Eternitie” (ll. 163–66). 11 If social superiority cannot be demonstrated as intrinsic, if “God makes both even, the Cottage with the Throne, / All worldly honours there are counted base” (“To the Ladie Anne, Countesse of Dorcet,” ll. 19– 20) and a redefinition of power relations in other spheres, as between men and women, becomes possible. The poet succeeds simultaneously at empowering women and at presenting the court as a corruptive influence when she implies that Anne of Denmark, James’s

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Queen, in her capacity as patroness has co-opted the talents of the poets she sponsors (including Ben Jonson): 12 “For you have rifled Nature of her store, / And all the Goddesses have dispossest, / Of those rich gifts which they enjoy’d before, / But now great Queene, in you they all doe rest” (“To the Queenes most Excellent Majestie,” ll. 7– 10). The existing hierarchy can be manipulated, as Lanyer demonstrates, to give power to women like Queen Anne, but the structure as concept remains problematic because such power comes potentially at the expense of other women, like Lanyer herself. 13 The second strategy Lanyer employs to challenge the male social hierarchy is to redefine power through the example of Christ’s sacrifice. The anomalous miracle of Christ is that “He that all Nations of the world controld, / Yet tooke our flesh in base and meanest berth” (“To the Queenes Most Excellent Majestie,” ll. 45–46). Christ’s power is defined as the ability to debase himself and to suffer harm willingly, like a deified Patient Griselda, earning the homage of those for whom he suffers (as Gosynhill argues that the domestic service of woman for man, particularly including childbirth, obligates men to honor women) as one “that purchast all your loves / In bloody torments” (“To all vertuous Ladies in generall,” ll. 59–60). The paradoxical empowerment of self-sacrifice begins with Christ’s incarnation, “Giving his snow-white Weed for ours in change / Our mortall garment in a skarlet Die, / Too base a roabe for Immortalitie” (ll. 1110–12). In hierarchical terms, the clothing of flesh Christ willingly adopts on behalf of humanity is demeaning in its inferiority to “his snow-white Weed,” yet “Our ragged clothing scornes he not to weare, / Though foule, rent, torne, disgracefull, rough and grosse, / Spunne by that monster Sinne, and weav’d by Shame, / Which grace it selfe, disgrac’d with impure blame” (ll. 1125–28). 14 In explicit contrast, Pilate’s expensive trappings fail to conceal his self-serving evil: “Now Pilate thou art proov’d a painted wall, / A golden Sepulcher with rotten bones” (ll. 921–22). As a peasant, Christ is despised by his privileged contemporaries; Lanyer reinterprets Luke 23:11 (where the intention seems to be mere mockery) to signify his tormentors’ strategy of making him equally disdained by the underclass, dressing him in “royall robes, which they in scorne did give, / To make him odious to the common sort” (ll. 905–6). These attacks on the hierarchical structuring of society and social values are complemented by a sharp male/female dialectic that invalidates the archetypal Christian vehicle of female subjugation, substituting the crucifixion of Christ for the disobedience of Eve as the archetypal crime against God. Queen Anne is invited to compare the portion of the poem entitled “Eves Apologie” with the Bible, “To

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judge if it agree not with the Text: / And if it doe, why are poore Women blam’d, / Or by more faultie Men so much defam’d?” (“To the Queenes most Excellent Majestie,” ll. 76–78). 15 Lanyer doesn’t attempt to deny women’s coinheritance of original sin, but asserts as the telling argument that men are guilty of the more egregious sin: the murder of Christ. She extrapolates an icon of male betrayal from the example of Jesus’s apostles, “For they were earth, and he came from above, / Which made them apt to flie, and fit to fall: / Though they protest they never will forsake him, / They do like men, when dangers overtake them” (ll. 629–32). If even these select, trusted males “from thy pretious blood-shed were not free” (l. 392), then all men are implicated in the crucifixion—to the same degree that all women traditionally have been judged complicit in Eve’s crime of disobedience. The grotesque procession accompanying Christ to Calvary presses the argument unambiguously: First went the Crier with open mouth proclayming The heavy sentence of Iniquitie, The Hangman next, by his base office clayming His right in Hell, where sinners never die, Carrying the nayles, the people still blaspheming Their maker, using all impiety; The Thieves attending him on either side, The Serjeants watching, while the women cri’d. (ll. 961–68)

Lanyer depicts the male network that collectively commits the murder of Christ, with each type of male contributing pejoratively to the spectacle (the Crier lies, the Hangman murders, the Thieves degrade by association, the Serjeants oversee without intervening). 16 Even the blaspheming “people” must be considered essentially male here, as the “women” who cry are identified in the text’s margin as the whole of the female community, “the daughters of Jerusalem” (93).

“All faire mindes”: Mapping a Feminist Aesthetic and Methodology Lanyer also makes practical use of popular masculine archetypes of virtue in order to recode them as feminine or to employ them as standards by which to measure superior feminine virtue. The Muses are praised as women “Whose godly labours doe avoyd the baite / Of worldly pleasures, living alwaies free / From sword, from violence,

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and from ill report, / To these nine Worthies all faire mindes resort” (ll. 32–35). Lanyer cannily co-opts the male icon of the Nine Worthies, discarding/disdaining the martial triumphs of its conventional constituents while fusing their fame with the unparalleled aesthetics and intellects (which thereby attract “all faire mindes”) of the Nine Muses. 17 While their male counterparts toil in carnal battlefields, the Muses are transcendantly occupied with “godly labours.” In a preview of her central manipulation of Christ’s death as a tool of female empowerment, the poet evokes the heroic death of Sir Philip Sidney as the credentials of a contemporary nonpareil: “That beeing dead, his fame doth him survive, / Still living in the hearts of worthy men; / Pale Death is dead, but he remains alive, / Whose dying wounds restor’d him life agen” (“The Authors Dreame . . . ,” ll. 141–44). 18 She selects Sidney’s heroic death at Zutphen, rather than his literary production, as the appropriate signifier of his male fame—doing so, apparently, to frame an encomium of Mary Sidney that eclipses the praise previously alloted her brother. Lanyer asserts that this is even necessary, “So that a Sister well shee may be deemd, / To him that liv’d and di’d so nobly”; however, when she proceeds to actual comparison, it is Mary Sidney who is designated the true nonpareil, “And farre before him is to be esteemd / For virtue, wisedome, learning, dignity” (“The Authors Dreame . . . ,” ll. 149–52). This strategy is adapted as a facet of Lanyer’s own program of selfempowerment and authorization in the text. Cautious of the prejudices facing a woman who exercises an independent poetic voice, the poet portrays herself “Much like unto a Bird that wants a wing, / And cannot flie, but warbles forth her paine” (“To the Queenes . . . ,” ll. 105–6). Whether the missing wing signifies a lack of social status (unlike the nine women for whom Lanyer writes epistolary verse dedications as the collective preface to her poem proper) that severely problematizes her attempts to challenge the status quo, or simply the socially pervasive gender bias opposing any such attempt (with the absent “wing” representing the hierarchically crippling absence of the phallus), though the poet/bird is hindered in her attempts to fly, she will nevertheless communicate the pain inspired by that loss. Moreover, the tortured warbling of her voice reveals an inspiration that is inaccessible to male poets. She apologizes to Queen Anne for the apparent presumptuousness of her poem, “Not that I Learning to my selfe assume, / Or that I would compare with any man: / But as they are Scholers, and by Art do write, / So Nature yeelds my Soule a sad delight” (“To the Queenes . . . ,” ll. 147–50). The “sad delight” Lanyer feels is genuine rather than the product of studied artifice, and she acknowledges that male poets are “Scholers” largely that

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she may imply the superiority of her own “natural” (i.e., emotionally authentic) verse in contrast. 19 The compensation of this natural inspiration, making it possible for her to join the ranks of women like Mary Sidney in challenging male monopoly on the practice of poetry, is both her legacy as a victim of a prejudicial social hierarchy (her “sad delight” hence a relative of the blues) and a gift from God. The poet cites several biblical examples of virtuous women (in the prose “To the Vertuous Reader”) empowered by God “to bring downe” the “pride and arrogancie” of evil men, listing Deborah, Jael, Esther, Judith, and Susanna, “with infinite others, which for brevitie sake I will omit” (49). Allying herself with an infinity of other suffering women divinely empowered to “bring downe” their male oppressors, Lanyer deftly subverts the social hierarchy by drawing her inspiration and authority from the same Christian God conventionally manipulated as an agent of feminine oppression. Situating her authority as poet in her suffering as woman, Lanyer affirms the propriety of her perspective by promoting opposition to those who practice violence, metaphorical and real, against the innocent. Hypocrites who merely pretend to believe in God are condemned for their “double-hearted” perjury, “Who with their tongues the righteous Soules doe slay; / Bending their bowes to shoot at all they see, / With upright hearts their Maker to obay; / And secretly doe let their arrowes flee, / To wound true hearted people any way” (ll. 105–10). Such dissemblers wield significant potential to harm, for “As venemous as Serpents is their breath, / With poysned lies to hurt in what they may / The Innocent” (ll. 117–19). 20 When “spightfull men with torments did oppresse” the archetypal male Innocent, Jesus Christ, subjecting him to “whipping, spurning, tearing of his haire,” the “Poore women seeing how much they did transgresse, / By teares, by sighes, by cries intreat, may prove, / What may be done among the thickest presse, / They labor still these tyrants hearts to move” (ll. 993–98, 1000). Lanyer approves the women’s opposition as heroic regardless of its efficacy to mitigate the violence against Christ. This resistance provides the preface to an archetype of suffering female innocence that complements Christ’s own: How canst thou choose (faire Virgin) then but mourne, When this sweet of-spring of thy body dies, When thy faire eies beholds his bodie torne, The peoples fury, heares the womens cries; His holy name prophan’d, He made a scorne,

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Abusde with all their hatefull slaunderous lies: Bleeding and fainting in such wondrous sort, As scarce his feeble limbes can him support. (ll. 1129–36)

Lanyer’s Virgin Mary, joined by her readers, is rapt/raped/trapped (left no choice “then but mourne”) by the vision of the crucifixion, when the rhetorical violence of the previously identified hypocrites and slandering unbelievers turns literal. As she witnesses the horrible spectacle, joining her tears with those of the other women present, she becomes a synecdoche for all women victimized by men. She is empowered as icon by the semiotic triad constructed of the “peoples” anger (read as male, though with prudence coded ambiguously) as immediate cause, Christ’s wounded body as immediate effect, and the women’s empathetic cries as the validation of her pain. Joining herself with the “admiring portraits of living women praised as the descendants of a redeemed Eve, the daughters of Jerusalem, and the Virgin,” 21 Lanyer becomes another woman empowered by her readiness to suffer the “peoples fury” in order to communicate her feelings. The poet also derives her authority from manipulation of what a marginal heading calls “The terror of all creatures at that instant when Christ died” (102)—particularly when she encodes it, paradoxically, as ineffable. “What creature on the earth did then remaine,” Lanyer asks rhetorically, “On whom the horror of this shamefull deed / Did not inflict some violent touch, or straine, / To see the Lord of all the world to bleed?” (ll. 1185–88). The reader is forced to reflect on the grotesquerie of Christ’s crucifixion precisely in order for the author to “inflict some violent touch, or straine” that cannot be evaded, for her to perform “her hieratic rites of female incantation behind the screen,” or authorization, of her Christian subject. 22 Christ’s power at the moment of his death is connoted through the potency of natural prodigies (“His dying breath did rend huge rockes in twaine” [l. 1189]), but the poet, armed like her nine dedicatees with feminine virtue, brandishes her own rhetorical power to punish the guilty, declaring that “Dead Saints did rise forth of their graves, and came / To divers people that remained there / Within that holy City; whose offence, / Did put their Maker to this large expence” (ll. 1197–1200). Lanyer even anticipates the personalized response of her readers attempting to comprehend the torments of the savior through the contexts of their own experiences of pain: retaining control of the poem’s polemic, she asserts that “None can conceive the

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bitter paines he felt, / When God and man must suffer without guilt” (ll. 1247–48). Superceding her previous evocations of the magnitude of Christ’s suffering, Lanyer proposes that the reader “Take all the Suffrings Thoughts can thinke upon, / In ev’ry man that this huge world hath bred; / Let all those Paines and Suffrings meet in one, / Yet are they not a Mite to that he did / Endure for us” (ll. 1249–53). The poet conceives the inconceivable in order to evoke, and, rhetorically, to exercise as her own, the supernatural power of Christ.

“Her venime purifi’d by virtues raies”: Summoning Women Warriors To combat the unspeakably horrific consequences of the murder of Christ (and its contemporary replication with women as victims), Lanyer exhorts her female readers to become warriors modeled after the heroes of feminized male myth as well as after Christ himself. Bellona, a “manly mayd” identified in the margin as “Goddesse of Warre and Wisdome,” combines conventional attributes of male and female superiority. She is “both faire and tall,” and though Lanyer dresses her with warrior’s arms and armor, her attire also includes “a helmet wondrous bright, / With myrtle bayes, and olive branches drest, / Wherein me thought I took no small delight” (“The Authors Dreame . . . ,” ll. 35, 38–40). Lanyer’s delight at revising the warrior icon to include the symbols both of victory and of peace is extended when she cites fellow poet Mary Sidney as a contemporary woman warrior. The Countess of Pembroke has done heroic service to women by successfully challenging the hegemony of male poets, “Whom Envy sought to sting, yet could not touch,” for “Her venime purifi’d by virtues raies, / Shee pin’d and starv’d like an Anotomie” (“The Authors Dreame . . . ,” ll. 100, 103–4). The woman warrior Lanyer envisions does not kill, but wields words to “purify” the misogynist attitudes that oppose feminine self-expression by reminding men of “your crueltie” in the death of Christ: “Your fault beeing greater, why should you disdaine / Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny?” (ll. 828–30). While the poet documents examples of conventional male warriors overcome by female opponents (e.g., “The Scythian women by their powre alone, / Put king Darius unto shamefull flight: / All Asia yeelded to their conq’ring hand, / Great Alexander could not their powre withstand” [ll. 1469–72]), her conception of the contemporary woman warrior draws its authorization from the model of

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Christ as the self-sacrificing soldier who undertakes, in the name of all sinners, To entertaine the sharpest pangs of death, And fight a combate in the depth of hell, For wretched Worldlings made of dust and earth, Whose hard’ned hearts, with pride and mallice swell; In midst of bloody sweat, and dying breath, He had compassion on these tyrants fell: (ll. 673–78; cf. ll. 1209–16)

The emphasis is not on the power Christ wields to achieve a conquest, but on his altruistic decision to “entertaine the sharpest pangs of death” on behalf of ungrateful “tyrants.” Hence the male “worth” of the Scythian women, measured by their efficacy at wielding violence “writ in lines of blood and fire” (l. 1473) is “not to be compared” (l. 1474) to that of the Countess of Cumberland, another modern woman warrior: Their powre was small to overcome Desire, Or to direct their wayes by Virtues line: Were they alive, they would thy Life admire, And unto thee their honours would resigne: For thou a greater conquest do’st obtaine, Than they who have so many thousands slaine. (ll. 1475–80)

The Countess is empowered by her virtuous life to wage a “farre greater warre” than that fought by conventional male warriors, “Against that many headed monster Sinne, / Whose mortall sting hath many thousand slaine, / And every day fresh combates doe begin” (ll. 1489–92). This hydralike personification of masculine transgression/aggression is unable with “all his venome” to “lay one staine / Upon thy Soule,” and “Though all the world he daily doth devoure, / Yet over thee he never could get powre” (ll. 1493–96). Her willingness to enter the male-dominated public arena on behalf of others—in her capacity as patroness, for example—links her to the Christ who intervenes on behalf of “wretched Worldlings.” Although her influence cannot guarantee her protection (and Christ achieves his greatest victory “In midst of bloody sweat, and dying breath”), she exerts a figurative power that surpasses even that of the biblical Judith: “For that one head that Judeth bare away, / Thou tak’st from Sinne a hundred heads a day” (ll. 1503–1504).

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“That may relieve him”: Rewriting the Text of Christ Wendy Wall has written that the “corporeal representation” enacted in Salve Deus Rex Judæorum transforms the crucifixion into “the site of a contest between the sexes, an agonistic moment in history that makes woman’s virtue visible,” 23 and Lanyer certainly exploits the manifold opportunities the crucifixion represents for “contesting” male villification and domination of women. She also fortifies her authority as writer by coding Christ’s violated body as the believer’s book of redemption, a book ultimately of her own shaping. Heralding the appearance of the tortured Christ in her poem, she announces “Loe here he coms all stucke with pale deaths arrows: / In whose most pretious wounds your soule may reade / Salvation, while he (dying Lord) doth bleed” (“To the Ladie Lucie . . . ,” ll. 12–14). The poet writes the book of Christ who himself writes the deliverance of the Christian reader, “For by his glorious death he us inroules / In deepe Characters, writ with blood and teares, / Upon those blessed Everlasting scroules” (ll. 1724–26). Lanyer exercises the authority of Christ’s sacrifice as her own when inviting the Countess of Suffolk “to take a perfit view, / Of those great torments Patience did indure” in “Writing the Covenant with his pretious blood, / That your faire soule might bathe her in that flood” (“To the Ladie Katherine . . . ,” ll. 43–44, 47–48), and the poet expands her pyramid of influence by inviting the Countess’s daughters to “see him in a flood of teares, / Crowned with thornes, and bathing in his blood” as prelude to his reception of the book of their sins. Surrendering it as the reward for Christ’s sacrifice, “loathsome death with grim and gastly look, / Presented him that blacke infernall booke, / Wherein the sinnes of all the world were writ, / In deepe Characters of due punishment” (“To the Ladie Katherine . . . ,” ll. 61–62, 65–68). The dynamic force of self-sacrifice is unambiguously displayed: the red book of Christ’s bloody body is shown to be more potent than the black book of death. Lanyer’s instructions for reading the wounded savior extends her own empowerment as author to her female readers, demonstrating that as Christ wrought their salvation, they can rescue him through an analogously dynamic altruism: There may you see him as a God in glory, And as a man in miserable case; There may you reade his true and perfect storie, His bleeding body there you may embrace, And kisse his dying cheekes with teares of sorrow,

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With joyfull griefe, you may intreat for grace; And all your prayers, and your almes-deeds May bring to stop his cruell wounds that bleeds. (ll. 1329–36)

The reader experiences the text of Christ as divine (“a God in glory”) and as mortally vulnerable (“a man in miserable case”), and from the latter state draws license to intervene through personal performance of “your prayers, and your almes-deeds” in the spectacle of the crucifixion, and even to reverse its horrors, figuratively healing “his cruell wounds that bleeds.” The modern woman, then, is given the power to reverse the archetypal male crime of murdering Christ by unselfishly offering her healing prayers and good deeds. 24 To enhance the reader’s sense of heroic triumph when contravening the cruelty to Christ in this manner, Lanyer amplifies the violence of the crucifixion as the text’s narration of the Passion progresses. Its condensed depiction in the early phases of the poem, while the author builds a rapport with her audience (“Christs bloody sweat, the Vinegar, and Gall, / The Speare, Sponge, Nailes, his buffeting with Fists, / His bitter Passion, Agony, and Death, / Did gaine us Heaven when He did loose his breath” [ll. 261–64]), expands later with emphasis on the discrete portions of Christ’s body, multiplying the sites of violence and hence of the violence inflicted on him (“His hands, his feete, his body, and his face, / Whence freely flow’d the rivers of his grace” [ll. 1727–28]). Besides amplifying the quantity of violence in this manner, Lanyer also intensifies the psychological quality of it, proposing, for example, that the Roman rationale for pressing Simon of Cyrene into service to carry Christ’s cross to Golgotha (Matthew 27:32; Mark 15:21; Luke 23:26), “to trie / All cruell meanes to worke in him dispaire” (ll. 1139–40), is to prevent Jesus from succumbing to mental and physical exhaustion, compelling him instead to meditate on his inevitable death at “That odious place, where dead mens skulls did lie” (l. 1141). The horror that Lanyer empowers her readers to reverse, then, becomes most gruesome in its representation of Jesus’s Passion as the sum of his suffering parts: With sharpest pangs and terrors thus appailde, Sterne Death makes way, that Life might give him place: His eyes with teares, his body full of wounds, Death last of paines his sorrows all confounds. His joynts dis-joynted, and his legges hang downe, His alablaster breast, his bloody side, His members torne, and on his head a Crowne

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sharpening her pen Of sharpest Thorns, to satisfie for pride: Anguish and Paine doe all his Sences drowne, While they his holy garments do divide: His bowells drie, his heart full fraught with griefe, Crying to him that yeelds him no reliefe. (ll. 1157–68)

The poet assures her readers that just as the devout male believer separates himself from the taint of his gender’s archetypal crime against Christ through self-sacrifice (i.e., by becoming Christlike), 25 so the female believer is compensated through fame and empowerment for her self-sacrifice made in the name of devotion to Christ. Indeed, if she “reads the book of holiness correctly and performs the right actions,” she “then becomes herself a text by her example.” 26 The Virgin Mary’s empathetic suffering not only signifies her devotion, but itself validates her son’s noble surrender of his life, as “Her teares did wash away his pretious blood, / That sinners might not tread it under feet” after losing “Her Sonne, her Husband, Father, Saviour, King, / Whose death killd Death, and tooke away his sting” (ll. 1017–18, 1023–24). Similarly, Lanyer herself becomes the tool for increasing the fame of altruistic women, naming some specifically and suggesting the unlimited potential of like sacrifices by others: “Many other examples I could alleadge of divers faithfull and virtuous women, who have in all ages, not onely beene Confessors, but also indured most cruel martyrdome for their faith in Jesus Christ” (“To the Vertuous Reader,” 50). A reputation for selfless assistance of others is represented as the individual’s ultimate personal enfranchisement, functioning as an extension of Christ’s own largess. Queen Anne, serving as an inspiration for other women through her example as patron of the arts, is herself described as a savior of sorts, “Which makes me thinke our heavy burden light, / When such a one as she will help to beare it” (“To the Queenes . . . ,” ll. 121–22). Lanyer advises her readers that Christ often appears to women in some manifestation of suffering, as a way of testing an individual’s compassion: Sometimes imprison’d, naked, poore, and bare, Full of diseases, impotent, and lame, Blind, deafe, and dumbe, he comes unto his faire, To see if yet shee will remaine the same; Nay sicke and wounded, now thou do’st prepare To cherish him in thy dear Lovers name: 27 Yea thou bestow’st all paines, all cost, all care, That may relieve him, and his health repaire. (ll. 1353–60)

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Thus, when a woman alleviates suffering through any act of selflessness, she effectively stops the bleeding wounds of Jesus Christ, “thy dear Lovers name,” and repairs thereby the archetypal damage done by the men who murdered him. With prudent self-interest, however, Lanyer also leaves the way open for the generosity of women to be expressed as part of “a family of maternal and sisterly patronesses who will honour and reward her celebrations of them and of the female sex.” 28 Lanyer’s rhetoric of violence works throughout Salve Deus Rex Judæorum to demonstrate that women can manufacture their own authority not only through literary manipulations, as she does, but through cooperation and the consequent construction of female community as well. The dream that the author recounts for Mary Sidney in her dedication describes that place where “Art and Nature striv’d / Which should remaine as Sov’raigne of the place; / Whose antient quarrell being new reviv’d, / Added fresh Beauty, gave farre greater Grace” (“The Authors Dreame . . . ,” ll. 81–84). The allusion to the competition between Minerva, Juno, and Venus for Paris’s golden apple (an offering to validate the male aesthetic of feminine physical beauty) is designed to show the danger of falling prey to division and masculine manipulation. The apple symbolizes the female breast throughout Greco-Roman mythology, 29 and in the example of the competing goddesses Lanyer reveals that veneration of the male archetype of competition over the female archetype of cooperation 30 tricks the women into competing for the symbol of what power is already theirs. Her advice to all such women is “in equall sov’raigntie to live, / Equall in state, equall in dignitie, / That unto others they might comfort give, / Rejoycing all with their sweet unitie” (“The Authors Dreame . . . ,” ll. 93–96). In a final polemical exercise of her rhetorical violence, Lanyer figuratively represents the dissolution of the female community at the manor at Cookham, where the Countess of Cumberland lived until 1605, as a natural disaster, and in doing so once again acknowledges the power of her patronesses. The departure of the women is marked by the estate’s vegetation casting “their leaves away” as “A swarthy riveld ryne all over spread, / Their dying bodies halfe alive, halfe dead” (“The Description of Cookeham” ll. 141, 145–46). The “green things did make the earth their grave” and “All desolation then there did appeare, / When you were going whom they held so deare” (ll. 196, 203–4). The implication is that the women’s return would reverse the effects—and once again, Lanyer invests her readers with the power of life over death.

5 “Violence and falsehood rules”: Subverting Masculine Romance in Lady Mary Wroth R epeatedly within the opening pages of Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania (1621), the title character counsels distraught lover Perissus to pursue vengeance for the apparent murder of his beloved, Limena, by her cruelly jealous husband, Philargus. 1 Her first argument proposes revenge as a (re)creative act: “Sir,” said she, “having heard some part of your sorrowes, they have not only made me truly pitie you, but wonder at you; since if you have lost so great a treasure, you should not lie thus leaving her and your love unrevenged, suffering her murderers to live, while you lie here complaining; and if such perfections be dead in her, why make you not the Phoenix of your deeds live againe, as to new life rais’d out of the revenge you should take on them? (4)

Perissus, however, is not exactly receptive either to this advice or to its source: “‘O God,’ cri’d out Perissus, ‘what divelish spirit art thou, that thus dost come to torture me? But now I see you are a woman; and therefore not much to be marked, and lesse resisted’” (4). Complicating matters further, Perissus reveals the contents of a letter written by Limena prior to her disappearance that anticipates her murder and charges Perissus to “revenge not my death on my murtherer, who, how unworthy soever hee was, or is, yet hee is my Husband” (11). This merely provokes an even more vehement outburst from Urania, who remonstrates “Leave these teares, and woman-like complaints, no way befitting the valiant Perissus, but like a brave Prince, if you know shee bee dead, revenge her death on her murderers; and after, if you will celebrate her funeralls with your owne life giving, that will be a famous act” (15). Thus the romance commences with a passive, “woman-like” man, and an aggressively decisive woman, in conflict. Reversals of this sort are a common feature of Wroth’s Urania, reflecting what Gary Waller reads as “a recurring fantasy for women in the period” that “they might emulate the autonomy and mobility of the courtly-chivalric heroes” 2 prominent in the works of 100

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male authors. That Wroth studied the martial exploits of characters in male prose and poetry—particularly in the works of her father and uncle—is apparent in her romance, though it is also significant that she was not entirely shielded from the realities of the battlefield. 3 Her appropriation of violence for the Urania, however, serves a rhetorical rather than mimetic function, precisely to achieve the sort of “autonomy,” or authority, traditionally denied to women writers. In the course of Wroth’s exchange of letters with Sir Edward Denny, concerning her purported representation of Denny in the Urania, she marvels “how noblenes can faile so farre, as to lett such rudenes witnesse against it selfe” and concludes from the evidence of this particularly unchivalrous knight that “violence and falsehood rules” (1983: 237). 4 To respond, then, to a world in which “violence and falsehood” are typically the tools of male empowerment, Wroth invests the fiction, or “falsehood,” of her romance, including the unpublished The Secound Part of the Countesse of Montgomery’s Urania (c. 1623), and of her comedy, Love’s Victory (c. 1620), with a discourse of violence that allows her entrance to those genres previously monopolized by male authors. At the same time, as this chapter argues, Wroth’s writings become themselves vehicles for feminine empowerment, affirming a feminist aesthetic that challenges the violence implicit in male depictions of love. Her manipulations of violence within the romance structure will be traced through her transference of male aggressiveness to female characters; through her exploitation of the rhetorical power of the body as erotic signifier; through her literalization of the metaphoric tortures of romantic love; and through her demonstration that female readers interpret violence differently than male readers.

“A steely faith I show”: Female Power and Aggression While the Urania features a complement of cruel women who prove both willing to adopt tactics of male aggression and adept at committing or commissioning violent acts, Wroth is careful to condemn their acts and to provide punishment in kind for them. 5 This explicit censure of immoral violence serves in part to deflect consideration of the consequences or significance of the appropriation of male violence by authorially approved female characters. When Emilina, the Princess of Styria, becomes another victim of the love deceptions perpetrated by a man passing himself off as Amphilanthus, she likens her defeat in love to one in war:

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sharpening her pen From victory in love I now am come Like a commander kild at the last blow: Instead of Lawrell, to obtaine a tombe With triumph that a steely faith I show. Here must my grave be, which I thus will frame Made of my stony heart to other name, Then what I honor, scorne brings me my tombe, Disdaine the Priest to bury me, I come. (1983: 162)

Although the violence here is ultimately self-directed in order to ascribe a particular pathos to the speaker’s suffering, an implicit quality of heroism without which it would cease to be tragic in the same sense comes from a sphere of military experience denied to Wroth’s contemporary female readers. Her choice of conventionally male adjectives (“steely,” “stony”) and her imperative self-control (“I show,” “I come”) combine to convey a confidence hardly characteristic or expected of a victim of seduction. Urania, whose advocacy of violence as the most effective form of retaliation makes her a figure to be respected (if not actually feared) from the text’s beginning, regularly exhibits behavior more conventionally displayed by male narrative heroes. Concerned for the safety of her beloved Parselius aboard ship, Urania valiantly ensures it (and Wroth, with the intervention of authorial voice, amplifies her efforts): “She, I say, when all were gone to rest, stood as Sentinel, but by her own appointment” (46). With an analogous resolve, Urania determines outside the Castle of Venus, “as she imagines, she must try the adventure, to let him see her loyalty is such, as for his love” (49). However, when a knight verbally abuses the names of Parselius and Amphilanthus, Urania, who is “heartily angry” at the offender, “could find no lesse punishment for him, then death. But then the Prince did with sweete perswasions mitigate her furie: but brought it no lower then to publike whipping, submission, and recantation: Lastlie, humbly on his knees to aske pardon of the Romanian knight” (41). While this call for violence amplifies Urania’s devotion to Parselius, it also invests a just female character with a frightening temper and the power to act on it. One can appreciate, then, that once Parselius rejects Urania and marries Dalinea, it is not merely guilt that causes the image of his former beloved to appear in his dreams “seeming infinitely perplexed, but as if rather fild with scorne, then sorrow, telling him, hee was a Traytor to love, and the subtillest betrayer of truth” (150). Like an altruistic knight, Silvestra in Love’s Victory pledges to prevent Musella’s enforced marriage to Rustic: “I / Will rescue her, or

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for her sake will die!” (5.3.17–18). Gary Waller connects Wroth’s manipulation of “the archaic genre” of chivalric romance to intrafamilial conflict, to appropriating her uncle’s and father’s essentially male literary vehicles for her own purposes, since the “ideology of violence and subjugation that is articulated in chivalry has had extraordinary and destructively intimate connections with the Western male psyche.” 6 The Urania may express the focus of her appropriation more precisely through its proverbial assertion that “women inraged they say are Devils” (563). That is, women who behave like men (e.g., Mirasilva describes Sildurino as “a Divell to my rest and quiet content” [579]) are immediately more noticeable and threatening than women who comply with male expectations. Their exhibition of male rage makes them seem unnatural, like “Devils,” but also conveys to them the power to turn the tables on men and make victims of them. 7 Wroth makes this connection explicit with the example of the Dianalike huntress with whom Dolorindus falls in love. At dinner, “Then fell shee to discourse of martiall things, being excellently learned in all the Arts”; the combination of her mastery of things both feminine and masculine “prov’d but more hurts to mee, making mee by them see my greater losse, love like a serpent poysoning my joyes, and biting my best daies, venomd all my blisse, making my new pris’d wound death to my hopes, and sorrow to my soule” (183). The Lady of Robollo, said to have “had soe great a spiritt as might bee called Masculine” (2: 156), particularly in her bold engagement in political discourse, is an empowered female analogue to the male disempowerment Paul Salzman has noted in the second part of the Urania, as Wroth undermines male dominance of chivalric narrative by displaying male heroes “having grown old, weaken, sicken, die, grow fat” and “become suddenly aware of the precarious nature of the macho ideal.” 8 The essential masculinity of chivalric narrative is dually threatened in Wroth’s writings by the decline of masculine physical prowess and by the potential for authorization and empowerment present in the resource of feminine anger.

“Not to be seene without adoring”: Erotic Signifiers and Rhetorical Impact Mary Ellen Lamb has argued that Wroth’s female characters demonstrate “their worth through a heroics of constancy predicated upon the intensity of their anger” and while they reflect the “implicitly angry” sentiments of their author, the romance’s “explicitly sexual” elements also spring from an autobiographical foundation. 9 Gary

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Waller concedes that “Sexual assault and masochism may well have been part of Wroth’s own experience of love,” but sees in her work the evocation of “a historically cultural unconscious, the fears built into being a woman in a particular masculinist society.” 10 If the text’s male eroticism is in part a reaction against the thrall of masculinist society, an empowering reversal of the male glance of control also composed by Wroth for the aesthetic pleasure of her female readers, 11 its depictions of women unclothed and imperiled are designed to signify the power of the female body as erotic signifier, even when it seems paradoxically most powerless and vulnerable. Philargus commands Limena to reveal the name of her lover, but she literally bares her breast 12 to him instead: “‘See here,’ said she, ‘the breast,’ (and a most heavenly breast it was) ‘which you so dearely loued, or made me thinke so’” (13), and the servant who recounts Limena’s heroic resistance later to Perissus testifies that the breast in question was “not to be seene without adoring” (13). Limena captures the male gaze with her ploy, and in so doing demonstrates the power of her body to compel attention, turning her own pending doom into a threat against her husband, forcing him to meditate on the past pleasure that he threatens to sacrifice. Her confidence that this strategy will affect him is formidable, for she taunts “such revenge will my death have, as though by you I die, I pittie your ensuing ouerthrow” (13; cf. 84). Perissus eventually rescues his beloved and is rewarded with his own glimpse of the desired breast while Limena narrates the sadistic tortures inflicted upon it by Philargus: “‘When I had put off all my apparrell but one little Petticote, he opened my breast, and gave me many wounds, the markes you may here yet discerne,’ (letting the Mantle fall againe a little lower, to shew the cruell remembrance of his crueltie)” (87). Helen Hackett has argued against a restrictive gendering of this episode that would oppose “female readers who find pleasure in noble examples of feminine heroism” to “male readers who take an ignoble or indeed deplorable pleasure in sadistic spectacles of women’s suffering,” 13 but it is also vital not to underestimate the emphasis Wroth is placing on attracting and manipulating male desire in her works, particularly as it affects the empowerment or disempowerment of female characters. Wroth makes her argument about desire for the body as a source of feminine power explicit in another example while the male gaze is otherwise erotically engaged. A “stranger Knight” recounts to Polarchos and Rosindy, disguised as Larchos and Cautulus, 14 his relationship to a woman in bondage/domination terms: “she is my Mistris, and I am one of her unfortunate seruants, held in a manner a prisoner, a Guard still on mee, yet am I appointed one to guard her”

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(401). The knights discover her “dressed as an inviter to those pleasures useth to bee, her necke all bare as low as her brests could give her leave for too much immodestie to shew, her sleeves loose, and as she stird her armes they would rise up and discover their nakednesse, and surely white . . . although never so much delicasie, wanting chastity will make men distract, for how ill soever men be in their discourse, or living, yet they love modesty best, and most prize it in their breasts, though their tongues say other” (403; my emphasis). Condemning the hypocrisy of men (who demand “modesty” from women while living “ill” themselves), Wroth frames her truism about the erotic power of the female body with references before and after to breasts, deflecting the male gaze once again while she addresses female readers. The male who can chastely resist such a display is consequently praised by the author (or, perhaps, identified as an idealized fiction). The true Sophy of Persia is described as wearing fashion “setting forthe the true proportion of her best-proportioned body,” and as having “such a skinn as would make thousand Jasons madd on travaile butt to see, though nott to touch soe pretious a fleece! Such, O such was and is her skinn, the perfectest of mortall creatures.” Yet the very point of this description is to valorize Rosindy as a man impervious to seduction, to thinking of women inevitably in sexual terms: “All this did nott amase the matchles Rosindy” (2: 168). 15 The Knight of the Faire Designe, Wroth’s Lancelot in prowess and desirability for the second part of the Urania, a feminized construction of the chivalric hero as his name suggests, twice appears in situations where he achieves heroic accomplishment by sublimating desire stimulated by the sign of eroticized/vulnerable femininity. He finds the King of Denmark and Queen of Norway naked and chained (“onely a small rag beefor him, his Queene by him in the same maner”) in Iron Maiden–like spiked chairs that further disempower them by restricting their gaze (“they cowld turne to noe side, butt they must wound them selves”[2: 328]). Though undistracted by the Queen’s nudity, Faire Designe finds himself unable to use keys to unlock the chains and returns to the body of the slain giant, their jailer, whom previously he had “cleft his head, helme, and all to his eyes” (2: 325). The knight takes another fetish of sexual desire, “the monsters lipps,” and “smeering the chaines with the blood and foame” (2: 328) from them, effects a miracle that releases the royal couple, their possessions and servants from a necromantic spell. Faire Designe also intervenes in the attempted rape of the “soe admired and honored” Queen of Bulgaria, her captors “purposing in the sight of her husband (the neat, brave, courtly King) to ravish her and then kill them both.” The knight “had noe patience, nor stayd

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for cerimonie, butt flew in, strake one of their heads of, an other his armes both of” (2: 298). Significantly, he destroys the gaze of the intended rapist, and removes the instruments of his cohort that immobilized her for that purpose. It’s unclear whether the Queen’s ultimate response reflects her sense of Faire Designe as an idealized male or as a feminized peer, but she is vexed “that she was soe strangly undrest and tattered in her habitts, her heare soe ruffeld, and her store of Ladys and looking glasses all distante” (2: 299). The conflict between men’s veneration of feminine chastity and their fascination with the exposed female body is exploited in another episode calculated by Wroth to incorporate the issue of female subjection to male violence. “Distracted” Alanius, initially thinking Nereana (whose own power is signified by the fact that Steriamus, who falls in love with her, finds himself “in such fetters, as her affection seemd rather a new torture, then a pleasure to him” [192]) to be his lost love, Liana, soon decides with equal derangement that she is instead a goddess of the woods: She, the more he spake, grew the more distemperd, at last with rage growing almost as madd as he, who now, fully perswaded shee was that Goddesse, whether she would or noe, would worship her, and that he might be sure of her stay, hee tide her to a tree; then to have her in her owne shape out of those vestures, which he imagined made her unwilling to abide with him: hee undress’d her, pulling her haire downe to the full length; cloathes he left her none, save onely one little petticoate of carnation tafatie; her greene silke stockins hee turn’d, or row’ld a little downe, making them serue for buskins; garlands hee put on her head, and armes, tucking up her smock-sleeves to the elbowes, her necke bare, and a wreath of fine flowers he hung crosse from one shoulder under the other arme, like a belt, to hang her quiver in: a white sticke which he had newly whittled, he put into her hand, instead of a boare speare: then setting her at liberty he kneeled downe, and admired her, when she almost hating her selfe in this estate fled away, but as fast as his sad madnesse would carry him, he pursued her. (197–98)

Capturing the male gaze once again with the details of Alanius’s stripping and idealized reclothing of Nereana, Wroth is free to pose issues of particular relevance to her female readers. It is Nereana’s resistance to Alanius, for example, that convinces him she is a goddess, meaning he had anticipated compliance or passivity instead. He imagines that the combination of his superior physical force and of her transformation into his visually idealized version of femininity will overcome her willfulness (i.e., her individuality); hence with confidence he releases her to become the object of his worship (of

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his conception of her, rather than of the woman herself—ultimately a self-worship). Nereana hesitates briefly because she is confronted by the compelling illusion that as the goddess of the woods, she commands Alanius’s absolute adoration. The “liberty” that consists of her being revered as Alanius’s ideally conceived deity, however, is simply one more devious, indirect form of bondage. Nereana’s experience, then, of “almost hating her selfe” derives from her recognition of the trap implicit in the temptation to remain voluntarily, 16 exercising the limited, self-deluding, self-denying “power” of a male-created goddess.

“Paines, sharp wounds, and cruell smarts”: Experiencing Metaphoric Violence Further shifting the conventions of male writing, particularly of courtly love literature’s focus on the response of the male lover, Wroth directs emphasis in her poetry and prose to a consideration of the suffering a woman may experience in the name of love, employing rhetorical violence to amplify such suffering by turning metaphors literal. Ann Rosalind Jones has noted that Wroth employs “concrete contemporary vocabularies of torment” in a “rhetoric of submission and shame” to break down “the opposition between unrequited love as a private dilemma and the pursuit of favor as a public one.” 17 That is, the common ground between the pursuit of these private and public approvals is the anxiety suffered by the woman, and Wroth resorts to concrete, cause-and-effect images of pain to communicate its intensity. The commitment to love Pamphilia expresses is so profound that even the slightest doubts about her beloved’s reciprocation of it proves agonizing. Her heart has shed tear-like “Drops of thy deerest blood” while “thou tortur’d wert with racks which longing beares / Pinch’d with desires which yett butt wishing reares” (1983: 107). 18 Suspicion that her beloved lacks her own devotion ensures “I ame by care sufficiently distrest, / Noe rack can strech my hart more” (1983: 121). Conversely, when Amphilanthus marries the Princess of Slavonia only to learn that rumors of Pamphilia’s betrothal to the King of Tartaria were false, he designates himself “the monster of sacred Vowes” and utters his own death sentence: “lett the execusion come, and leave itt nott to mee to bee mine owne execusioner, unblest and wreched in myne owne execusion” (2: 138). His sister, Urania, shifts the emotional locus back to Pamphilia and her plea for response from Amphilanthus: if he delays, “‘she may bee killed with your cruellty, and you onely live to beewaile her most

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undeserved and untimely death and murder’ ” (2: 140). In her evocation of the pain she experiences upon the death of her beloved, Polydorus, the daughter of Plamergus blurs the distinction between metaphoric and real suffering. Even the memory of any show of “disfavor” from her beloved proves a “bitter eating sore” such that “No corsive can make wounds have torture more” (1983: 165). The lover’s insecurity about the beloved—rather than actual rejection or willful cruelty on the beloved’s part, as in male love poetry 19—creates such apprehension that “Obedience, feare, and love doe all conspire” to torment her: “Thus I remaine like one that’s laid in Briers, / Where turning brings new paine and certaine woe, / Like one, once burn’d bids me avoid the fires, / But love (true fire) will not let me be slow” (1983: 151). Pain and love thus become familiar conjunctions in the course of Wroth’s writings—occasionally even yielding hyperbolic descriptions like Dalinea’s falling “into the most dolorous, and unsufferable passions, that violence in violent love could produce” (151)—until naivete gives way to experience’s circumspection: “Oft did I wounder why the sweets of Love / Were counted paines, sharp wounds, and cruell smarts / Till one blow sent from heavnly face prov’d darts / Enough to make those deem’d-sweets bitter prove” (1983: 145). Significantly, the images Wroth employs to present the metaphoric torments of romance are frequently culled from the conventionally male sphere of experience, some even recalling icons associated with specific authors like Foxe (in Pamphilia’s lyrical complaint that “None butt Martirs hapy burne” [1983: 138] and a similar allusion in Love’s Victory [5.6.69–70]). 20 Wroth reverses the perspective of the hunter and the hunted so common to male love poetry, for example, to force reflection on the plight of the conventionally hunted woman. Antissia, rejected in love but also troubled by self-blame, “walked like a hurt Deere, staying no where, vexed, and tormented, thinking stirring, and running would helpe, but all proov’d contrary, she must yeeld to her hurt, and lye downe with her harme” (361). Literal and metaphorical harm merge once again when Dolorindus falls in love with the huntress he encounters in the woods: “she stroke him with a Crossebow to the heart; then weepingly hee fell downe at her feete, groaning for her unkindnesse: yet was not this the cruelst blow she gave, for (O me) shee did likewise wound my breast. Then came they all about her, admiring the hurt, while I admired, any seeing her, could live unwounded” (182–83). 21 The violent entertainment of baiting bulls and bears yields a poignant conceit for the rebuffs and abuses suffered at the hands of the male beloved when Bellamira complains about Treborius “the moover of my torment looking on

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me with as much pitie, as the Master of a good Dog doth on him, when he is hurt by his owne setting on, upon either Bull or Beare” (385). Wroth reveals that a self-rationalizing trap has already been sprung on the lover in the very conception of this simile. To conceive her relationship to Treborius as that of owned to owner is to sacrifice autonomy and self-esteem; hence Bellamira rationalizes that she has chosen this role and has actually grown to love Treborius’s cruelty, “‘where unkindnesse, ungratefulnesse, scorne, and forsaking dwelt, (odd motiues to love) yet lov’d I the keeper of these wrongs’” (390). Josephine Roberts has noted that the motif of Cupid’s vengeance, so prominent in Love’s Victory, also functions thematically in the Urania; 22 but while she was thinking primarily in terms of the play’s pastoral structure when noting “the disturbing consequences of having Venus and Cupid as supreme rulers,” 23 the significance of the text’s rhetorical violence is best appreciated if we read it as supporting Wroth’s response to the popularity of neo-Senecan revenge tragedies. Venus and Cupid, respectively, occupy the Senecan positions held in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy by the Ghost of Andrea (wronged individual) and Revenge (the personified affirmation that vengeance for that wrong is just), who open the play and comment on the action unfolding throughout it, though in both texts “the function of the two as chorus is not classical.” 24 Like the cycle of revenge that is initiated once Hieronimo’s son, Horatio, is murdered, and like the frustrated complaint by the Ghost of Andrea to Revenge, “Brought’st thou me hither to increase my pain?” (2.5.135) once his friend, rather than his murderer, is killed, the love complications effected by Cupid fail to satisfy Venus’s thirst for retribution: “’Tis pretty, but ’tis not enough. Some are / Too slightly wounded,” and Lissius “with too little pain hath got his rest” (3.3.7–8, 10). Having felt slighted by the play’s various lovers, Venus rationalizes a vindictive punishment; but where the revenge tragedy glorifies and amplifies its violence as much as it condemns it, Wroth’s characters react against the Senecan formula of blood vengeance. Recognizing the self-destructive potential of revenge and ultimately not wishing to destroy the celebrants of love, Venus asks Cupid to “slacken then thy hate” (4.2.6)—but, being male, the instrument of her romantic revenge evolves into an automaton who insists that “some yet must try / More pain, ere they their blessings may come nigh” (4.2.13–14). Cupid begins enjoying violence for its own sake (perhaps reflecting the taste of audiences for violent plays like Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Chettle’s Hoffman, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, or Middleton’s madcap The Revenger’s Tragedy), and the selection of Kyd’s tragedy as Wroth’s archetype of macho revenge

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(acknowledged intratextually by allusion to Hieronimo’s famous 3.2 soliloquy, “O eyes! no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears”: “O eyes, that day can see and cannot mend / What my joys poison” [5.1.1–2]) is perhaps best explained in the Ghost of Andrea’s pronouncement after the play’s bloodshed concludes, “Ay, now my hopes have end in their effects, / When blood and sorrow finish my desires” (5.4.271). Avoiding Don Andrea’s hollow satisfaction, Venus concludes Wroth’s revenge comedy by punishing Arcas, the cause of the play’s discord, with “shame” (5.7.161, 166) rather than death, leaving open the possibility of his repentance and redemption. Wroth also incorporates metaphoric violence to give immediacy to character responses when the emotional intensity of their feelings interferes with (or even precludes) the verbalization of their experiences. This ensures that her disaffected lovers, particularly when women, are not silenced or overwhelmed when attempting to evaluate and to communicate their sentiments. A lover who has “confest” her feelings to her inquisitorial beloved continues to face his interrogations: “yett must I ever bee oprest / With your toungue torture which will ne’re bee spent?” (1983: 113). The figurative severity of the male response becomes more affecting to the reader through the depiction of castigation as an act of violence and vice versa; in such practice, the wound is another kind of message. The rejected lover’s depression is expressed as destructively self-perpetuating, her cries returning “to wound my brest, / Which wounds did butt strive how, to breed more harme / To mee” (1983: 104), these “wounds” revealing more about her state of mind than any literal account of the actions of the beloved that trigger her responses. 25 To be sure, violence is more familiarly the preemptive language of irrational (male) anger employed to end discourse, as when Amphilanthus attacks the evil Duke who tries to imprison and kill Ollorandus, his rightful king: “as he was opening his mouth to speake hatefully to them, he thrust his Sword into it, hindring those villanous words which hee had else delivered” (270). For Wroth, however, violence is most effectively used to bridge gaps in discourse, to articulate what might otherwise go unsaid (or unread). In a variation on the male poet’s conventional promise to immortalize his beloved in verse, Pamphilia carves her torment into a tree, wounding to eternize her own wounding: “Pitiles I doe wound thee, while that I / Unpitied, and unthought on, wounded crie: / Then out-live me, and testifie my woes” (1983: 150). This is a self-signifying communicative act, despite its author’s complaint about remaining “unthought on.” It is the literal exercise of violence in this context that Wroth most explicitly marks as gender determined, as in the case of the male

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lover who blames himself for the deaths of both his beloved and her husband. He responds to his guilt with self-harm, “Then gave I my selfe many wounds, never ceasing wounding, while my wounded soule abided in my body”; believing himself to be suffering justly for love, he reads the effects of his self-mutilation as “my martyr’d body” (179). If the wound, then, can be construed in this fashion, suicide must be read as an individual’s final word—and the ultimate act of selfauthorization. 26 Urania recommends it to Perissus as “a famous act” if he will follow his revenge on Philargus with his “owne life giving” (15). Wroth in general is more conservative with her application of this advice, however, using it as a barometer of approval or disapproval for individual characters in the romance. Though Clarimatto kills his lordly rival only to die shortly thereafter from his own wounds, it is their mutual beloved who has the final word. Looking “upon them both, the one dead, the other dying, she said nothing, but kneeled downe by her latter loved friend, and kissed him, rose again, and looked with infinite hate upon Clarimatto, and then taking a knife she held under her Gowne, stabb’d her selfe, falling betweene them both” (106; cf. 179). Such a death dignifies both lover and beloved, 27 testifying to the power of this female lover to achieve her own literary immortality. This effect is determined by the relative innocence (and authorial approval) of the individual committing suicide. The wife of Terichillus is overheard by Amphilanthus, who is nearly crushed by a stone she rolls at him: “‘Accursed fortune, that still hath crost my desires, now will I not be more crossed in this wicked world; farewell cruell men, all mischiefs attend you both, and curst be your best wishes.’ With that shee threw her selfe from the topp of that huge Quarry, into the place where Amphilanthus sate” (286). Although the character’s attempt to kill Amphilanthus codes her pejoratively, she retains the author’s sympathy as a victimized woman and is allowed the autonomy of determining her own final word to the “cruell men” she blames for her misery. An analogous dignity is denied the male suicide Clotorindus, whose final words are deprived of meaning by Rosindy. Brandishing his dagger, Clotorindus “in a curst voyce, said, ‘Thy Victorie shall yet never bee honoured by my death, which but with mine own hand shall bee brought mee.’ Then stab’d hee himselfe in many places of his bodie, and so fell. The Prince scorning to touch him, commanded the Souldiers to take him, and throw him into the Ditch, esteeming that too good a buriall for him” (159). Wroth exercises her own power here to negate male self-determination, but more importantly she posits in Rosindy’s scornful reading of Clotorindus’s act as cowardice

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a gendered difference in the way violence is interpreted by women and men. 28

“More then I ever found in man”: On Women Reading Violence This essential difference is dramatized in Wroth’s account of Leonius discovering a bear threatening a lady. Interrupted, the furious beast “sought to execute his furie on him, from whom he got a sharpe, and sower encounter, Leonius his sword passing into his throate, wherewith he fell, then strake he off his head” (427). In the aftermath of this victory, Leonius reveals his inability to predict how the rescued lady will read the signifiers of his violence: When hee had killed the Beast, hee tooke the Head, Paw, and Heart to present her withall; Speeches hee framed to deliver to her with those won reliques, Prose and Verse hee summoned, doubtfull which should . . . please her best; hee feared one while the hideous face of the Beast would fright her, therefore thought the heart fittest, and enough to shew her, as her prey, the Paw hee thought fit, because it was lifted vp against her, and if that, the Head as necessary which hatched the treason, of these three, and with these three he danced the Hay in discourse, and still ended just as uncertaine and apt to begin againe, as to conclude. (427–28)

Leonius tries to calculate what portion of the bear to present, when he might more aptly weigh the effects of perpetuating the attack in the lady’s memory. The conqueror here reflects on his choice of symbolic trophies because he wishes to memorialize his triumph and to receive the lady’s grateful recognition of his success; yet in so doing, he ignores the lady’s likeliest response and forces her to relive the trauma of the attack through association of it with the dismembered bear. Stymieing his attempts to employ her own tactic of combining “Prose and Verse,” Wroth makes Leonius tongue-tied to underline her point that he cannot communicate to the lady because of the conflict in their respective readings of his violence. Because he insists on commemorating his victory and acknowledges no meanings for his gory trophies but that with which he encodes them, he will continue to “dance the Hay”—performed ordinarily by three dancers (here the bear parts) in a figure-eight pattern that continually returns to its point of origin—in his frustrated attempts to communicate with the lady. 29 Wroth also suggests in a curious episode that might otherwise seem oddly out of place in a romance (i.e., in a narrative predicated on

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conflicts both physical and emotional that anticipate the eventual union of women and men) that male aggression misreads, and thus violates, the natural order. A woman, cast adrift by men to die, narrates her tormentors’ miscalculation: When I was to be put into this Tombe, as was meant me, the chiefe Lords and Officers came to see me (according to the Prince his order) committed to the Sea, into the Ship they put me with meate for three dayes, no man nor creature with me but my Dog, which would not forsake me, and they allowed with me, not for love, but hope of harme to me; for my Victuals they imagined he would have share of, and at last devoure mee, being one of the fiercest in all the Country. But in this they deceived themselves, for since wee came aboard, which is now eight dayes, he hath satisfied himselfe with very little, and never troubled me. A Fisherman came by, and would have had the Dog, he entised him, but his faith to me (more then I ever found in man) his distressed Mistris, held him with me; hee threw him then a large piece of meate, which though stale, was good enough for a Dog, he tooke that, and fed a little on it, but as if weighing his estate, left part for other times; the man also gave mee something, pittying my case, but not daring to helpe mee, left me. (540)

In this microcosm, the male assumption is that personal need supercedes all other considerations in nature and hence ensures that the dog will keep itself alive at whatever necessary cost to its owner. Wroth’s challenge to this notion balances the callous inhumanity of such men with the natural loyalty (“more then I ever found in man”) and companionship of the altruistic dog as displayed in its decision to eat “very little” of the shipboard provisions and to remain with its unfortunate owner despite the fisherman’s enticement. That is, the male reading of potential violence here is self-referential, a projection of what the men who set the woman adrift can imagine themselves being forced into doing in order to survive—their “devouring” being a logical extension of the dominance they exercise in the very act of abandoning the woman to what they expect will cause her death. That the woman is still alive after eight days, despite being given “meate for three dayes,” is evidence of her prudence, but the fact that she has given even “very little” of her rations to the dog is testimony of her own altruism. Wroth’s model, then, anticipates and confirms modern feminist distinctions (like that proposed by Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice) between the male/competition and female/cooperation archetypes of behavior. 30 She rewards her character’s self-sacrifice by making her lifelong companion faithful to her even in death: the woman and dog are eventually marooned on an

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island “with an old religious father, there shee remained, and spent the rest of her dayes in prayer, her Dog still garding her, which at her death brought her (who out-lived the old man) to have a Christian buriall by his howling and crying, calling passengers in, and buried her, but could not win the Dog from the grave, but there he died” (540–41). In a number of her depictions of physical violence in the Urania, Wroth recodes the plot device of swordplay in male romance designed to demonstrate the fighting prowess, and hence the heroism, of certain characters, and instead uses such encounters to amplify her thesis that the willful exercise of violence is self-destructive. As is sometimes signified through graphic punishment (e.g., the “chiefe Villaine” responsible for the attempted rape of Queen Melasinda is quartered, disemboweled, and exposed “to invite all such monsterous beasts ore ravenous foules to feast on his most beastly parts” [2: 179–80]), the instigators of violence necessarily become themselves the victims of their actions. A trio of knights attempt to assassinate Claramundo, but he turns a magic shield on them “and Just wher they thought surely to hurt the King, their owne swords in theire owne hands turnd, and wounded, and slew them selves” (2: 254). The Albanian Duke and sex criminal Demonarus, who believes “Ravishing (if to death) was little or nott att all thought to bee a fault,” develops an incestuous desire for his own daughter, Lydia: “Hee threatned tortures, then perswaded, then theatened againe” (2: 310). When his son, Amarintus, attempts to save his sister and the Duke strikes at him, Lydia steps in and “had the blowe her self, which was ment to her brother” (2: 312), resulting in the enraged Duke butchering his family before killing himself in despair at his loss. The same pattern is employed in describing a particular monster among the twelve facing Parselius: one more fierce and Ugly then the rest, who fedd onely of humaine flesh. Hee had the face of a weched, weesell-faced old man, disproportioned, crooked, ore like him self, which was unlike all other man; and such an one as seemed hee rather ravinously sought blood and flesh of man kinde then loved itt. For itt thrived nott with him, but hee grew still more ravinous, still less fleshy, especially craving the distrucktion of his owne blood, and that consumed him and ruind him. (2: 320)

An overdetermined signifier of pejorative male values (“fierce and Ugly”), 31 the monster is a composite of Spenser’s Wrath (1.4.33–35) and Despair (1.9.54) that becomes ever more emaciated and disfigured by its irrational, predatory appetite. He is, however, “unlike all

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other man,” since as a monster he is unable to choose not to continue. His ruin, though no less inevitable than that of Demonarus or any other male proponent of violence, is a function of his nature, rather than of his will. The reported death of Limena in the opening pages of the Urania foreshadows a number of similarly apparent executions of strong female characters who ultimately survive male predation. Wroth’s design is to encourage readers, regardless of gender, to revise expectations concerning the use of violence as a strategy of control (while exercising it rhetorically herself), particularly as applied to the subjugation of women. To this end, she conceives a variety of Grand Guignol–style illusions that focus reader attention on the horrors of (male) violence and then exploit that amplification to reveal its ultimate ineffectuality. Clotorindus weds Rosindy’s beloved, Meriana, and when Rosindy effectively besieges his rival’s palace, Clotorindus orders Meriana brought out on the ramparts for Rosindy to view. Soon “was shee out of Rosindys sight, and presently againe brought into it to his extreamest miserie, for onely that peerelesse head was seene of him, being set upon a pillar, and that pillar being upon the top of the Pallace, the haire hanging in such length and delicacie, as although it somewhat couered with the thicknesse of it, part of the face, yet was that, too sure a knowledge to Rosindy of her losse” (158). Upon storming the palace, however, Rosindy finds no head there, “the just disstance and art in the making being such and so excellent” that he discovers the pillar a trompe l’oeil device, and Meriana’s “owne complection naturally a little pale, made her seeme more then usually, and so nearer death, the intent being to make Rosindy beleeue shee was dead, which conceit, he hoped would leade him thence” (160). 32 Clotorindus is shown to have erred in viewing Meriana’s pseudo-execution as a deterrent to Rosindy’s siege; violence provokes violence, and Rosindy is inspired not to leave, but rather to achieve revenge on his supposedly murderous rival. Wroth’s resurrection of Meriana also reminds the reader of the power wielded by the author to punish and to protect, to create and to re-create—a power that her own example demonstrates to be available to women as well as to men. The climactic illusion, which significantly complements the reconciliation of Limena and Perissus early in Urania with the problematized, unresolved relationship between Amphilanthus and Pamphilia at its conclusion, forces a man and a woman independently to face evidence that the other has died for love. It is in the divergent responses of Amphilanthus and Pamphilia here that Wroth makes her most definitive statement about the differences between men and

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women. At the end of the first part of the romance, when Amphilanthus looks into the stone entrance to the hell of deceit, he sees Pamphilia dead, “her breast open and in it his name made, in little flames burning like pretty lamps which made the letters, as if set round with diamonds, and so cleare it was, as hee distinctly saw the letters ingraven at the bottome in Characters of bloud” (655; cf. the parallel to Spenser noted in Roberts’s edition of Wroth’s poetry [1983: 179]). His response is to resolve that “nothing should remaine as witnesses of his former ficklenes, or the property of that place, destroying the monument, the Charmes having conclusion with his recovering” and to do so he recovers his lost sword and armor, for “none but himselfe could have gayned the Sword” (661)—that is, only he could symbolically right the wrong he’d done to his beloved. Amphilanthus’s solution is to efface his wrong through sheer might of violence, to destroy the reminder of his infidelity to Pamphilia as though it is simply another enemy to overcome. When Pamphilia looks into the same circle of stones leading to “a place like a Hell of flames, and fire, and as if many walking and throwing pieces of men and women up and downe the flames, partly burnt,” she sees “before them Amphilanthus was standing, with his heart ript open, and Pamphilia written in it, Musalina ready with the point of the sword to conclude all, by razing that name out, and so his heart as the wound to perish” (583). Josephine Roberts reminds us that in the second part of the Urania, Wroth “makes clear that Amphilanthus is not alone at fault for breaking his vow, for Pamphilia also agrees to marry someone else,” 33 and hence like Amphilanthus, Pamphilia must also determine some way to atone for infidelity. Wroth chooses to distinguish the female response as unique, and hence Pamphilia does not echo Amphilanthus’s strategy by destroying the reminders of her weakness. Instead she returns to court where she lives “more like a religious, then a Court life” (584), choosing not to deny her past errors but rather to commit herself to taking control of her life to come. The first part of the romance ends, then, with Pamphilia confident and satisfied in her decision, and Amphilanthus forced to settle for the gratification of whatever boons Pamphilia grants him: Amphilanthus must goe, but intreates Pamphilia to goe as far as Italy with him, to visit the matchles Queene his mother, she consents, for what can she denye him? all things are prepared for the journey, all now merry, contented, nothing amisse; greife forsaken, sadnes cast off, Pamphilia is the Queene of all content; Amphilanthus joying worthily in her. (661)

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These patterns are replicated and amplified in the second part of the romance. Amphilanthus is indeed betrayed by his former tutor, Forsandurus (pejoratively feminized as a “man-witch”), and the Queen of Candia (“as well ore better practised” as the scholar “in the muddy ground of wickedest inventions and treacherous attempts” [2: 132]), into believing Pamphilia betrothed elsewhere. But when he learns the truth, he is twice ready to drown himself (2: 172, 182) with recourse to violence again to obliterate his error. Pamphilia, dreaming of her beloved’s pending betrayal, initially blames herself, but quickly reasons “‘I ame guiltles. If I erd, itt was in confidence. If soe, noe error’” (2: 108). She refuses, finally, to blame her self for what she could not control, and instead deconstructs the unattainable emotion, a product of male poets and romance writers, that ultimately must be held accountable for her unhappiness: “‘restless yett fruitles love, thus onely to possess, to kill; to ingender purposely to distroy; to injoye, onely to ruinn; lastely to crush all hapines into the sharpest Juise to poyson truth in blessed love’ ” (2: 108). While identifying and neutralizing the sources and strategies of male power and control in Urania, Wroth alters the roles and tactics of the romance heroine in responding to a male-dominated world. 34 Hence, as Nona Fienberg has argued, in Wroth’s work there are “no blazons scattering the parts of her beloved, no fetishizing of a veil, a foot, an eyebrow, and thus no self-creation out of the scattered parts of the beloved” (177). 35 Whereas the majority of Urania’s male characters are named, many of the romance’s women remain anonymous, suggesting that the author’s object is to treat the condition of women in general rather than to limit herself to “self-creation out of the scattered parts” of specific feminine fictions. Her creations speak frankly about the suffering to which men subject women, prove themselves resourceful and resilient in adversity, and demonstrate themselves capable of appropriating male power and violence, though choosing more often to eschew it. Moreover, like their creator, they invite scrutiny even while deflecting it, sharing Donne’s rhetorical strategy (in “Love’s Exchange” and “The Legacy”) of the dissection that conceals even while it discloses: Pray desect me, sinewes, vaines, Hold, and loves life in those gaines; Lying bare To despaire, When you thus anatomise All my body, my heart prise;

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sharpening her pen Being true Just to you. Close the Truncke, embalme the Chest, Where your power still shall rest, Joy entombe, Loves just doome. (1983:161–62)

Like the maid who is overheard singing this song by Amphilanthus and Ollorandus, Wroth invites inspection—confident, however, that while her male readers are involved in the task of cutting and looking “Where your power still shall rest,” it is her female readers who will most successfully read her and see her.

6 “Tears woundes & blood”: Lady Anne Southwell’s Caustic Meditation on Domestic Survival W hen she married Captain Henry Sibthorpe in late 1626 at age fifty-three, Lady Anne Southwell had been known by the surname she received from her first husband for thirty-two years. Hence as a matter of custom rather than of choice, the commonplace book recorded in the folios she received as a wedding present from her second husband has come to be known as “The workes of the Lady Ann Sothwell” (1). 1 It is fittingly ironic that the same text which displays the encouragement and respect Southwell received from Sibthorpe should also serve, through a systematic discourse of violence, employing a wide variety of tropes, as a cathartic account of memories and experiences associated with her marriage to Sir Thomas Southwell. With years of anger and frustration behind her, she observes in “Thou shalt not commit Adooltery” that for maydens choyce I haue not much to saye for they are bounde vnto theyre fathers will and yet they ought with dyligence to praye that god will gyve theyre father care and skill to choose for them a wise and sober mate that may not wrongg that honorable state (83; ll. 257–62)

Folio 51v, from which the passage is taken, shows evidence of Southwell’s revision of the last two lines of this stanza to read, “to choose for them a wise and honest wight / that thow mayst still find fauor in his sight” (83; ll. 61–62). Numerous allusions to the “wrongg” that her first husband did to “that honorable state” of marriage, and the author’s apparent inability to “find fauor” with him, appear to constitute the emotional core of Southwell’s commonplace book and to provide the fuel for poetic attempts to reconcile her “profound sense of godliness” with “the pain, bitterness, or defiance” 2 that her writings suggest she experienced. The sharp edge of Southwell’s poetry is expressed variously with a nervous, urgent energy and with a detached, sardonically witty, meditative voice. Read together, these contradictory modes signal the 119

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complex of internal conflicts that motivate her writing. Sometimes they are displayed in the subject digressions or redirections that address very different concerns than those suggested by the titles she assigns certain poems, and sometimes in the tension between her desire to find spiritual rationales for her experiences and to exercise a secular philosophy that simply articulates the unattractive realities that, for her, too often have characterized human response and interaction. This chapter examines her use of rhetorical violence for argumentative emphasis as she maps the variety of domestic, cultural, and intellectual traps awaiting women generally, but most particularly awaiting the woman unfortunate enough to marry, as she did at the age of twenty-one, unhappily. Beginning with her thinly veiled references to a variety of domestic problems, we will follow her efforts to demonstrate the emotional control of her life that helped her to survive bitter experience; to affirm her own authorship and creative skills as tools for purging the anxieties of her past; to detail and to put to rest the sufferings inflicted by an adulterous spouse; and, through a published foray into the literary landscape—in which she challenges male opponents no less influential than Dr. John Donne and Sir Thomas Overbury—to resist popular masculine values and aesthetics while affirming her faith in, and loyalty to, worthy women and men.

“Truth and falshood Cannot hould one roome”: Troubles on the Home Front Thanks apparently to his family’s court connections, Thomas Southwell was knighted in 1603, and the couple subsequently moved to take up residence in County Cork at Castle Poulnelong. Her husband’s royal appointment to assist in managing English plantation interests in Ireland must have seemed a mixed blessing at best to the staunchly anti-Catholic poet: Yf in Hibernia god will haue mee dye, I cannot haue your capon eaters knell, yett for a pound Ile haue an hundred crye, & teare theyr hayres like furyes sent from hell poore wretched soules, they’r full of such madd fittes, the Pope doth cozen them of wealth & wittes. (132; ll. 241–46)

Southwell’s conventional criticism that Catholic response to death is

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hyperbolic, demonstrated by her juxtaposition of it with the simplicity of Protestant practice (the wake versus a simple [“capon eaters”] church “knell”), recalls some of the arguments of Anne Askew. In “An Elegie written by the Lady A: S: to the Countesse of London Derrye,” 3 for example, she explains to Cicely MacWilliams, Lady Ridgeway, that poets and “Popleings” are both “makers” of gods: “Poets makes blinde Gods, whoe with willowes beates them, / Popelings’ makes Hoasts of Gods, & euer eates them” (26; ll. 79–80). In an interestingly playful bit of self-mockery (considering the voluminous amount of her poetry contained in the commonplace book), she dismisses both poets and popes: “whoe deales too much wth eyther, is an Asse” (26; l. 82). Linda L. Dove has noted that Southwell also sees an analogy between scribes and the pope, since both “seek a fame that doesn’t belong to them but instead to the author of the text, or, in the pope’s case, to the author of the world.” 4 The usurping of fame in the spheres of verse and faith also had an extremely personal resonance for Southwell since she married into the notoriety associated with her husband’s uncle. Robert Southwell, the Jesuit poet, was executed just a year after the poet wedded Thomas Southwell in 1594. Despite his death, his reputation as a poet was enhanced when printers issued two volumes of his work in 1595: Saint Peters complaint, with other poemes, 5 and Moeoniæ. Or, Certaine excellent poems and spirituall. The Southwell family, then, already had one poet, and, to Lady Anne’s chagrin, a Catholic one at that. Additionally contextualizing everything she writes about her time in Ireland is the spiritual reality that as a stranger in a strange land, she would not have had recourse to the same sort of religious community she had grown up experiencing in England. This spiritual alienation would seem to direct her toward her own family and its private observance of Protestant faith, but there are intriguing suggestions in Southwell’s poetry that she may not have found solace in her daughters, Frances and Elizabeth. 6 One of the two examples in the manuscript of pointing finger illustrations, known variously as indicators, digits, or pilcrows to bibliographers, inserted in the margin apparently to indicate special emphasis, accompanies this couplet: “Children are ofsprings of or blood / that often choke theyr founts wth mudd” (16; ll. 25–26). While we might be tempted to read this as a simple acknowledgment of the vicissitudes of child-rearing, there is a consistent pattern of conflict associated with children in Southwell’s verse that implies something more. In “Written in commendations of Mr Coxe (the Lecturer of Acton) his booke of the birth of Christ,” the poet incorporates her own initials into the text to link a biblical example to an aphorism:

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sharpening her pen Goodnes & constancye must grow together If eyther part asunder, both doe wither A:S: But like Rebecca’s Twins wthin the Mother doe strucgleinge seeke to murther one another. (28; ll. 7–11)

There is biblical precedent for linking the conflicted children of Rebecca with the survival of the Christian faith in Romans 9:8–13, which distinguishes between “children of the flesh” and “children of God,” and which, after acknowledging her children, concludes, “It was said vnto her, The elder shal serue the yonger. As it is written, I haue loued Iacob, & haue hated Esau.” 7 Bringing up children in Catholic Ireland would have been a source of concern for Southwell at any rate, but her selection of the image of Rebecca’s children struggling “to murther one another” is repeated in the strife between Jacob and Esau, of which she also writes in an untitled poem: “Iacob and Esau wrastled in one wombe / So truth and falshood Cannot hould one Roome” (36; ll. 14–15). This image of the contest inside the mother was for some reason compelling to Southwell, whether its origins were imaginative extrapolations of child/parent conflicts, or reflections of a lack of family unity, or perhaps were even experientially based. 8 Even the threat of children becomes a part of her rhetorical repertoire. In a 1623 letter to Sir Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork, she requests assistance on behalf of an old friend of her father who is waging a land dispute; but if he refuses his assistance, “I must bee forc’d to put up a petticion against you” with the aid of his wife, who “by this tyme (I hope) is stronge enough to putt you ten thousand pound in debt by the birth of another sonne or daughter.” 9 Completing Southwell’s map of a dysfunctional household is her vitriolic portrayal of the murderous motives of the men and women hired to work in it: “Seruants are Traytors, theiues, and Spies / that for or Pelfe in Ambush lyes / And in or vice wth smiles Doe stroke vs / to gaine the stronger chords to choke vs” (16; ll. 20–23). These lines appear in an untitled poem that opens, “ffrayle Loue is like faire flowrie fields / pursued by Autume at the heeles” (15; ll. 11–12), a misanthropic meditation that also includes the image of Rebecca’s battling infants. As tempting as it may be to ascribe these lines to pet peeves or minor irritations, in the face once again of repeating patterns, amplified by rhetorical violence, we must take them seriously along with other concerns the poet addresses. Another untitled poem, which opens, “Who euer sawe himselfe but in a myrrour,” presents this cautionary advice:

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Behould not troopes of servants with delyghte, if they bee good, they bee thy humble frends if badd, bee sure they will woorke the but despyghte they serue not thee, but theyre owne pryvate ends they’ll tosse thy honoure like a tennis balle. and beinge full, like leeches off they falle Thy woords must bee imprysoned in thy harte, thy wealth must searue, but theyre necessitye, as for theire loues, expect the poorest parte. mans nature is, to hate servyllytie. and in thy vice, with smyles they’le seeme to stroke thee, onely to gayne the stronger cords, to choke thee. Thus is thy freedome, by thy follye bounde. thy thoughts confused, to gouerne theyr confusyon. if thou bee sterne, that is theyr hatreds grounde. thy kindenes breeds contempt, and base intrusion, thy sinnes are doubled in thy sauiors sight, whoe doth commaund thou gouerne thyne aright. (50; ll. 46–63)

What makes this particularly striking is the fact that Southwell places herself at the nexus of a network of contradictions. While manager of the household, she is conscious that “mans nature is, to hate servyllytie”; while needing to project authority, being stern “is theyr hatreds grounde”; while hoping to win approval and loyalty, “thy kindenes breeds contempt.” Her discomfort at being in Ireland, of finding herself dependent on the services of people who consider her an interloper, is magnified into the fear of being herself manipulated by “smiles” that “seeme to stroke thee,” masking the true intention of gaining “the stronger cords, to choke thee.” The resulting “confusyon” must have been extremely unpleasant to inspire the articulation of this particular anxiety—phrased as choking cords wielded by supposedly friendly hands—twice in the first third of the commonplace book.

“When all is burned”: Southwell’s Philosophy of Survival We know from the testimony of a Captain Skinner that Southwell was capable of making “violent exclamations” 10 in public, yet the poet acknowledges that while wrath is a fundamental response to problems and frustrations, its costs, particularly in spiritual terms, are dire. In

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a short lyric entitled “Anger,” she cautions herself, “Yet see! This Embrion setts the frame on fire / The onely Bane that on the world doth fall” (13; ll. 2–3). Appealing because it is immediate and reactive, it is nevertheless self-destructive: “they that haue it hold a torturing hell” (13; l. 5). She gives a more introspective analysis of the dangers of succumbing to anger in a poem she labels both “Dialouge” and “Sonnet”: Where wold’st thow place the Tropheyes of thy Euills? With the Diuills. What dost thow gayne (think’st thow) in thy vexation? Damnation What might I call so monstrous an Elfe? Madnes it selfe Who are thy fellowes in the Earth or Ayre? Hell & despaire What wold’st thow leaue behynd the in thy moode? Teares woundes & blood. When will the fury of thy Source be turned? When all is burned. (13–14; ll. 9–20)

This self-interrogation juxtaposes a disapproving questioner (“thy Euills,” “so monstrous”) with a respondent who seems quite aware of the costs of anger, yet who expresses them in the vocabulary of Senecan tragedy rather than of repentance. As Anne Dowriche argues in The French Historie, once one becomes committed to the exercise of violent emotion, it is difficult, if not impossible, to halt that exercise until “all is burned.” Southwell implies here, however, that it is possible to control one’s anger if one objectifies it as petty (“vexation”), spiritually threatening (“Damnation”), dementia (“Madnes”), or arbitrary (“moode”). Recognizing her personal inclination toward volatility, Southwell provides a reasoned rejection of it 11—and models one of the components of a personal philosophy that aided her in surviving her life’s trials without becoming irrevocably embittered. Southwell also exhibits an attitude of contemptu mundi that complements her efforts to resist anger while negotiating the threat of depression. Reminding herself that people are “but fynite Sommer flyes” and their cares the “Laborious Webbs” (2; ll. 4, 6) that ensnare them, she describes the consequences of dwelling on one’s limitations and of thereby becoming a mere victim of circumstances: Alas poore man poore ayre poor water booble thou arte but slyme, but dew, Ielly possest,

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a house of skinn whose basese stands on trouble a hell of thoughts a pilgrim voyd of rest sinnes camping ball [i.e., football] the obiect of afflyction the praye of death knowledge of selfe eviction (59–60; ll. 91–96)

Whether one’s “knowledge of selfe eviction” signifies the link to original sin or the individual’s capacity to trigger her own despair by self-signifying as “the obiect of afflyction,” Southwell warns here that passive acceptance of life as cruelly vindictive (whether as a homeless “pilgrim,” “sinnes camping ball,” or death’s “praye”) is lethal. To avoid it, she ascribes purpose to life’s trials, declaring in her “Apothegmes” that “Afflictions ar the schoole of god” (107; l. 74). This spiritual affirmation addresses her concern with becoming obsessed by “a hell of thoughts,” and she asserts that each person should “let fayth stande vpp since reason groueth madd,” that people are not simply animals of nature who, like “the grayne wee sow doth dy, rott, loose his shape” (71; ll. 393, 399). That she successfully resists both despair and cynicism through her disdain of life’s caprices is perhaps nowhere demonstrated so clearly as in the original lines that she adds to her transcription of Sir Walter Ralegh’s “The Lie.” Where Ralegh’s sarcasm permeates each lie he lists, Southwell’s “lies” reveal her lifeaffirming confidence in the individual’s ability to impose meaning on daily chaos: “Tell beautie it is a flourish / Tell tyme it steales a way / Tell thoughts they all must perish / And fortune doth betray” (3; ll. 43–46). A recognition of violence as the most compelling human tool of persuasion also appears in Southwell’s meditations on successfully navigating challenges, perhaps being most succinctly stated in her declaration that “whipps perswade vs more, then loue, or grace” (26; l. 90). In conceding this, she rationalizes her use of rhetorical violence throughout the commonplace book to cut through insecurities, to overrun emotional defenses, and to force reader engagement with the text (by attacking passive reading). That is, “when a Lythargye, o[u]r braynes doth fetter, / the onely way, to rouse againe o[u]r witts, / is, when the Surgions cheifest toole, is whips” (27; ll. 96–98). God is frequently made the agent of this stimulus, allowing Southwell to distance herself from her own figurative exercise of violence. In “Thou shalt not take the name of god in vayne,” she opens what is ultimately a personal account of fighting to defend reputation and honor by inserting the precedent of God as injured party: “Know you not that the lord his cause will take / into his owne hand and for his renowne / and to him selfe will satisfaction make / and headlongly

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will throw blaspheamers downe” (57; ll. 7–10). This warning is designed as a deterrent, but it becomes the provocation for a more personal inquiry: “Looke but at home into thy secret harte / if men do slander or abuse thy name / wilt thou alowe or take it in good parte / nay wilt not kill him that hath wrongd thy fame / to saue thyne honoure thy owne vaynes shall bleed” (57; ll. 13–17). Southwell is distinguishing between divine and mundane violence here: an omnipotent God risks nothing in exacting revenge, but human revenge, subject to idiosyncrasies and miscalculations, is ultimately an exercise in self-destruction. The Old Testament image of God the wrathful is similarly evoked even in the New Testament, as when Philippians 2:12 advises believers to “make an end of your owne saluation with feare and trembling” (which the Geneva Bible glosses, “Which may make you careful & diligent”). 12 To Southwell, a believer in the doctrine of election, such a passage has a more sinister resonance for the Catholics, believing instead in works, who surrounded her in Ireland: “a reuorantsed case of desembling / working salluasion out with fear and trembling” (75; ll. 67–68). The commonplace book shows us that Southwell was able to combine her efforts to restrain anger, her sentiments of Christian contemptu mundi, and her acknowledgment of violence as a common means of coercion, with her own research and reflection into a strain of Christian neostoicism (though she wouldn’t call it that, as we shall see below) that aided her in tolerating the intolerable aspects of her life in Ireland. We know that Seneca’s proof of divine existence in De providentia, and his assertion that “the assaults of adversity do not weaken the spirit of a brave man” because “Without an adversary, prowess shrivels,” 13 appealed to Southwell, for she writes in “A Paraphrase vppon Lucius Anneus Seneca on his booke, of Prouidence” that “wrastling wth Calamity” yields “For euery poyson his trewe Antidote”: “God makes no fondling of those men he chuses / But hardens them, the Dasterds he refuses” (12; ll. 25, 28–30). Under this philosophy, daily conflicts are recoded as heroic contests that actually benefit the individual: “So all the stroakes that Goodmen doe endure / Are as the fyre that makes the gould more pure. / Theise Diamonts by Cuttyng giue best splendor / Theise Gumms by beating Sweetest Odour render” (12; ll. 37–40). 14 “Hardened,” then, to accept conflict as a gift God sends to the elect, the poet views suicide—and even modest degrees of self-harm such as doubt—as impious and ignoble (“May wee not say hee is a foole or madd / that sheaths his swoord in his owne harte or brayne” [60; ll. 115–16]), and refuses to indulge in self-pity by blaming her problems on bad luck:

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Lynck chaunce and vyolence both in one chayne say that a reame fales downe and breakes oure back yst not all one if equall bee the payne as if a prince did put us to the rack thinck still on death so chaunce is but a fabell opyinyon onely makes men myserable (89–90; ll. 163–68)

“Cares,” writes Bishop Joseph Hall in The Art of Divine Meditation (1606), “are a heavy load and uneasy; these must be laid down at the bottom of the hill if we ever look to attain the top.” 15 Cares, or “opyinyon,” are the “poyson” that Southwell needed to purge to achieve emotional health and confidence, and her writing is the “trewe Antidote.”

“I write but to my self & mee”: Self-conscious Authorship Southwell is quite precise about the purpose of her writing, announcing in “Precept.4.” that “I write but to my self & mee / what gods good grace doth in my soule imprint” and will not “lett it at soe base a rent / as wealth or fame, wch is but drosse & vapor / & scarce deserues the blotting of a paper” (151; ll. 289–90, 292–94). 16 The position here of disparaging external circulation/consumption of her texts, however, is not without its own internal conflicts. At times she feels obliged to affirm her spiritual foundation by denying the intellectual contexts she treats elsewhere with respect. 17 To support the ideology of “The ffirst Commandement. Thou shalt haue noe other gods before mee,” for example, she negatively contrasts classical with biblical literature (calling it “A sicknes to, to much infecting paper / to mixe heauens milke with aconite of hell”) by opposing “gods worde” to “vaine fables,” challenging (herself? Sibthorpe? An imagined reader?) to “Trye Seneca and Paule with one touchstone, / Way Aristotle with wise Solomon” (45; ll. 25–26, 28–30). Ever the selfconscious writer, Southwell even resorts to creating her own devil’s advocate, as though she anticipates outside objections that her privately conceived text would seem unlikely to generate or receive: & now mee thinkes I heare some wizzard say how dares this foolish woman bee soe bold. ask Iahells nayle yt Siseraes head did stay

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sharpening her pen & Iudiths sword that made her hott loue cold Hee that enabled them, enables me. yf thou seeke knowledge hee’l enable thee. (147; ll. 139–44)

If this is solely an internal dialogue, and the “wizzard” simply a personification of her own doubts, then she resolves them with the dual strategy of citing biblical precedents of other bold women, thereby using rhetorical violence to secure her authorization, and of asserting the promise that God empowers women who resist the (masculine) representatives of sin and attempt to live righteous lives. While this may itself seem something of a contradiction from someone who accepts the doctrine of election, it validates Southwell’s convictions concerning personal morality and authorizes her as someone who has sought for, and been rewarded with, God’s “knowledge.” Though Southwell seems not to have realized at the time of composing her elegy to Cicely MacWilliams that her friend had actually died, the position she gives herself in its text is that of self-assured witness and empowering force: “In speakeinge to a dead, a sencelesse Lady / Yow Incke, and paper, be hir passeinge bell, / The Sexton to hir knell, be Anne Southwell” (27; ll. 118–20). When, however, she deliberately turns to the task of memorializing, she bolsters her efforts by subjectively associating the effects of death with the women it bereaves. Her epitaph written for the Elector Palatine, Frederick V (d. 1632), “Who liued his death; and dyed his life,” immediately turns to the figuratively violent effects of that death, both on his wife, Elizabeth Stuart, and on everyone who hears of her suffering: “now pittie leads vs to his wife / Whose many griffes; and good desarte / makes eich man weare a wounded harte” (32; ll. 3–6). Similarly, in “An Epitaph vpon ye king of Swede,” Gustavus Adolphus (also d. 1632), although the poet announces this loss to be “the subiect of a woeful storie / to fright the eares of all possteritie,” the pathos of his death is again communicated through the violence associated with feminine suffering: “The widdowe earth Imbalmes his Corpes in teeres / and on her Coutch of Ibbonie lyes Mourninge / Hopeing to frame a deludge for her feares / inraged with greefe against all Coumforte spurninge” (33; ll. 3–4, 13–16). These subjects seem particularly taxing to her, emotionally, as she expresses the hope that the “fond world” will “leaue this foolish trick / Of writeinge Epitaffs vpon the dead / But rather write them one the Quick” (95; ll. 19– 21). Regardless whether Southwell is compactly lampooning a range of poetic conventions and tropes by warning imagined readers to “encampe your selues in reareward of this battle / And when I will

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historifye your knights, / Echo and Parrett, ayd mee wth your prattle / ffor yor traditions are of power enough / to Magnifye such momentarye stuff” (45; ll. 8–12), or soberly castigating the male instigators, “you Gyannts, or Hyennas that doe dwell, / here proudly trampling o’re your owne bredd hell” (95; ll. 1–2), reponsible for the death of a twenty-five-year-old military captain, 18 conflict as a dynamic is central to the semiotics of her poetry and to her self-conception as a writer. Linda L. Dove sees the use of imperative form in Southwell’s acrostic encomium to Francis Quarles specifically as evidence of “a speaker who feels free to advise her mentor,” 19 but the poet herself gives a more comprehensive rationale for using imperative voice as a rhetorical amplification to create, and exploit, conflict. In “Thou shalt not make to thy self any graven Image nor the likenes of anything,” she succinctly outlines the semantic strategy of the ten commandments: “In terror for the hardnes of your harts / god wroght the lawe in the imparatiue moode / afflyction beating on youre steely parts / must tame your wanton thoughts and make them good” (55; ll. 19– 22). Southwell clearly exercises the “imparatiue moode” to achieve an analogous sense of control in her writings, as when she creates a litany of fear in “I am thy god thatt brought thee oute of the house of bondage thou shalt haue noe others g[od] but mee”: feare him that oute of Eden Adam turned. feare him that into hell the Angels hurlde. feare him that Sodom and Gomorah burned. feare him that in his anger dround the woorld. feare want of feare for tis a fearefull thing to fall into the hands of heauens great king[.] (53–54; ll. 61–66)

Recognizing that the intimidating power of the command, “feare want of feare for tis a fearefull thing,” is a necessary product of the violent directives preceeding it, Southwell adopts the imperative voice of the male-gendered deity to empower her own words. Indeed, she does so most frequently to enhance her condemnation of the acts of men (“Let Carnall men, ly snoreinge as secure / and scorne Gods Iudgments, in their acts Impure” [36; ll. 17–18]), and in so doing avoids sounding merely disaffected or misanthropic. Where men are concerned, Southwell argues, “Tell them of God or heauen, you had as good / tell them of Skogine, or of Robin Hood” (36; ll. 21–22). 20 To reinforce her position of authority and control in the commonplace book, and to assist her efforts to purge her past of unpleasant memories, she also incorporates rhetorical violence

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into metaphors and allegories that allow her to denounce male qualities or policies without necessarily indicting the entire sex. 21 While joining authors like “Jane Anger,” Esther Sowernam, “Constantia Munda,” and Aemilia Lanyer to attack the literary condemnation of Eve as a tactic of patriarchal hegemony, Southwell also exploits the retaliatory opportunity to construct meaning for the jeopardized figure of Adam, whom “six Monsters that with irefull stinge / did almost wound to death,” those six monsters being “Suggestion, consent, and custome” which “brought / weaknes, and blindnesse, and defiled thought” (41; ll. 49–52). If we read the first three as synonymous with antifeminist innuendo, male majority opinion, and patriarchal tradition, tools of perpetuating patriarchy, and their consequences in the latter three as the disempowerment and disparagement of women, then we see that the poet’s tactic here is to suggest that these attitudes are equally destructive to men; if one wishes not to “wound” Adam, one must not defame Eve. Not letting slip the opportunity to build on the image cluster, Southwell adds that without care and vigilance, “A threefould species of this horrid crues / inuade Man’s Memorie and it’s power subdues”—that “threefould species” being “Opinionated, idle Burthensome” (42; ll. 55–57). Another approach is to construct a set of images that supports both positive and negative readings of the male, as in “Thou shalt keepe holy the saboth daye”: Draw oute a souldyer of this woorlds makeing how like a petty pedlers pack, hee walkes, his raggs, ropes, hornes, and pouder, boxes shakeing, and like, a feend, with blood and fyre hee stalkes, kennells all night in durt, and in the day getts often knocks, but seldome getts his pay. Poore wretched mapp of princese tyrrany, were not his slauery guilt and fynely drest and all his vyle and barberus butcherye by courage valoure fortitude exprest; this hellish trate woold fall, and hell woold misse a member to accommodate theyre dis (66; ll. 207–18)

Despite his appearance at times like “a feend,” with the “blood and fyre” of his weapon linking battle’s effects with its cause, the soldier is an instrument rather than an individual, acting only because he is first acted upon politically. His existence is a “mapp of princese tyrrany,” for without the shields of privilege (“guilt and fynely drest”) and macho heroism (“courage valoure fortitude”), those who choose

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to wage war would be seen as agents of hellish destruction. Southwell draws this “mapp” once again to highlight what is worst in men, rather than to revile all men unconditionally. 22 Her unconditional and universal condemnation seems to be reserved for one particular man—or type of man—only.

“Am I a yookffelowe, or slaue”: Dispelling the Taint of Adultery Considering Southwell’s frequent condemnations of adultery and profligate sensuality in the commonplace book, the absence of a husband figure from her depictions of the domestic conflicts that once troubled her seems due less to her approval of Sir Thomas Southwell’s contribution to them, or to his involvement in the public sphere that might have kept him away from the household, than to his apparent participation in extramarital liaisons. She laments that her “dearest” is not “as thow appearest”: “Thow hast sworne might I beleeue the / Ill do I deme my suspition / And to say much, Doth grieue me / That I see thy bad Condition” (15; ll. 1, 3, 6–9). This ill-concealed “bad Condition” is elaborated in a lyric sardonically titled “Blessed Life,” where the poet attacks the “man that’s vassaliz’d to pleasure” as “a foole, a Coward, and a slaue” whose “handes are bound in Cordes of delectation” (12–13; ll. 1–2, 5): “Voluptuous men are neyther good nor Wise / Nor neuer shall a blessed life comprise” (13; ll. 13–14). While she categorically condemns the man who consummates marriage (i.e., engages in sex) with “a second wife / before his first bee dead,” warning that “presumtion stickes a canker on his life / & a de[f]ect of murder to his fame” (135; ll. 342–45), two particular arguments personalize the issue for Southwell as she works to rationalize and to purge this aspect of her past. One has ramifications for her spiritual well-being: having surrendered her husband first to rivals, and then later to death, she ponders “What haue I lost; some base addulterouse lover; / O tis a happie blest necessitie; / That frees the soule; from hell bredd aggonie” (32; 6–8). The other absolves her of blame for proving unable to curb her spouse’s proclivities, for “if thou haste a husband that is nought / thinck tis thy fathers faults on thee are layde” (84; ll. 269–70). At no point does she consider Sir Thomas Southwell’s class position as a mitigating factor in his libertine conduct or in her assessments of it, for “Titles are gawdes to still ambition / death, tyme, and fame change theyr condicion” (15; ll. 17–18). Beyond social embarrassment and personal humiliation, perhaps

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the most serious implication of marital infidelity for Southwell was the stigma, and physical threat, of venereal infection. Treating marital betrayal as the responsibility both of the adulterous husband and of the individual(s) complicit with him, she creates poetic structures that allow her to chastise both parties. To provide opportunity to express her revulsion for what she was forced to suffer, the poet crossexamines her rival, vilified as the personification of Envy: “Come forth foule Monster, at truthes barr to stand / hould vp thy leperose, and Infected hand (33; ll. 1–2). Recalling one of the symptoms popularly associated with venereal disease (and consequent systemic destruction throughout the body), the examiner cries, “sure thy breth doth stinck / Worss then a sinck” (33; ll. 13–14). She addresses her husband directly when declaring that “Nature, Mistris off affection / gaue my loue to thy protection / Wher it hath receiued infection / and is dying” (16; ll. 1–4), and closes the lyric by demanding of the offender, “Am I a yookffelowe, or slaue” (17; l. 37; cf. Philippians 4:3 for the spiritual resonance of this image). Personifying the rival as Pleasure, she acknowledges the damage that hedonism can wreak, but disempowers its agent by devaluing her attractiveness, “Yet wisest myndes will Count her dimples skarrs” (13; l. 9), or, more specifically, pox scars. 23 In “Thou shalt not commit Adooltery,” she reduces the unfaithful to “noysome carryon” whose “leprous fame infect socyetye,” and assigns them a hideous punishment, declaring that to God “theyre soules and bodyes are in such contempte / as flaming hell must their infection cleere,” so “they’re marrow fryse with paynfull agonye” when “theyre cankred sores, are brought to light” (76; ll. 2–6,16). The depiction of the adulterer as two-faced, or as having a “twoefold monsters face” (76; l. 13), may also imply homosexual activity, since “this double damning vyle Hermophradite” is identified with “The Sodomytes” (76–7; ll. 14,19). 24 The recurrence of these pejorative images, and the vehemence with which they are reviled, argues that the pain Southwell expresses here is not feigned, and that she experiences it imaginatively through her writing in the hope that her own figurative scars may finally heal.

“Better ground haue better seedes”: Affirming Woman’s Voice Since the range of Southwell’s interests as a writer were not limited to a private exorcism of unpleasant facets of her past, we should also examine the ways in which rhetorical violence assists her in writing persuasively on women’s issues, and in refusing to allow the defama-

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tion of women—even if supposedly comic, and hence harmless— to go unanswered in the arena of literary publications. Sir Thomas Overbury, who eventually became a target of Southwell’s distinctly feminine wit, expressed the common male perspective on the role of women at the conclusion of his poem, “A Wife”: As Good, and wise, so be Shee Fit for mee, That is, To will, and Not to will the same, My Wife is my Adopted-Selfe, and Shee As Mee, so what I loue, to Loue must frame. For when by Mariage both in one concurre, Woman converts to Man, not Man to her. 25

In what might at first glance seem reiteration of this view, Southwell cautions women to “learn to know your station and your duty / both to your lord in heaven and on earth / and thinck what pryvelege you gayne by beauty / men giues it you, tis none of yours by byrth” (82; ll. 221–24), but her argument is that this is the way of the world, rather than what is just. To prove her point, she offers an image of impossible violence: “goe bid the infant at your brest” that “by you he never shall be blest / vnlesse he presently goe kill a gyant”; the absurdity underscores her depiction of subservience as an expectation, as a social norm, and explains why the imaginary child remains unblessed, and the real woman remains oppressed due to her gender: “where god doth barr, the meanes, he barrs the effect” (83; ll. 227, 229–30). 26 Southwell, however, works to manufacture her own “meanes,” presenting a logical refutation of the “peruerse and wilfull herresye. / In thinkinge ffemales haue so little witt / as but to serue men they are only fitt” (42; ll. 4–6) that forces the reader to choose between concluding that women and men are equal, or that God’s creation is imperfect: God made a helper meete and can you think a foole a help, vnless a help to sink God called them Adam both, and did vnite both male and ffemale one hermophradite And beinge one ther’s none must dare to seuer without a curss, what God hath ioyned together Soe either count her wise, or him a foole or else Creation fail’d in a true rule (42; ll. 23–30)

Southwell introduces another significant equity argument into the “defense of Eve” tradition by citing the scriptural evidence of Gene-

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sis 5:2 in her margin, a passage specifically glossed in the Geneva Bible to explain its strange assertion: “By giuing them bothe one name, he noteth the inseparable coniunction of man and wife.” 27 Additionally, to place emphasis on the union of female and male, she manipulates the sign of the hermaphrodite, used here not to connote the unnatural, but rather to draw on classical authority as a complement to biblical authority, recalling the myth of the archetypal female/male composite described by the character Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium. Southwell even effectively takes away the male prerogative of asserting masculine superiority at the cost of creation’s perfection, as the very act of doing so would undercut the basic assumptions of patriarchy: “But O poore Adam this thought makes mee sadd / thy lefft syde is turned ffoole thy right syde madd / How comes thy glorye thus to be rebated, / that weart at first so perfectly created” (43; ll. 47–50; on his loss of sovereignty, see ll. 51–56). 28 The assured, confident tone of Southwell’s profeminine arguments might well cause the modern reader of her commonplace book to wonder why she did not publish it, or portions of it. A number of answers—with a common implication—to this question may be found in the canny reasoning of “Precept.4.”: Could you, as did those Sybells, prophecye men will but count you witches for your skill or bee endowed wth any qualitye they’l poyson it wth some deprauing ill Envye is barren & yeeldes nought but weedes & feares least better ground haue better seedes. Nay should a wise & honest harted man commend a virtuous woman for her life would they not say the worst of him they can & cutt his good names throat with envyes knife. call him your bedesman, parasite or minnion what sanctitye can scape from bad opinion (156; ll. 451–62)

The repetition of “envye” here signals Southwell’s dual fear about exercising her wit publicly for all to see: because such action deviates from the perpetuated norm of women’s limited abilities, what might be accounted the wisdom of the “Sybells” is degraded as the “deprauing ill” of “witches.” Nor would the poet suffer alone for her talent; a “wise & honest harted man” like Captain Sibthorpe, whose own words at the end of the commonplace book praise her “Discreet affibility in behaviour” and “Profound knowledge in learning” (116; ll. 15–16), 29

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would be maligned and have “his good names throat” cut simply for having supported and commended “a virtuous woman for her life.” Rather than simply speculating on what might happen if she were to decide to publish her writings, Southwell may be reflecting here what was, indeed, her experience when she matched her wit to male contemporaries in Overbury’s A Wife Now the Widdow of Sir Thomas Overbvrye (1614). It is unclear whether Southwell’s contributions to the text were solicited or volunteered, or whether they were written before or after Overbury’s death by poisoning on 15 September 1613, 30 but they clearly are designed to respond in kind to witticisms made by authors Overbury and John Donne in the segment of the text titled, “Newes, from Anywhence: Or Old Truthes vnder a supposall of Noueltie.” Overbury’s “Newes from Court,” for example, reports “That the meanes of begetting a man”—that is, sex—”hath more encreast mankind then the end” (F4), that is, procreation, while Southwell’s “Answer to the Court newes” matches him with her own sexual allusion, “That mans strength is but a vicisitude of falling and rising” (F4v). She imitates Overbury’s aphoristic tone, while also expressing her barbed witticisms much more succinctly. Overbury writes that “all women for the bodily part, are but the same meaning put in diuers words; that the difference in the sense is their vnderstanding” (F4v), while Southwell curtly replies, “mens loues are their afflictions” (F4v) and achieves a multiplicity of puns on “loues” (variously signifying female beloveds, male affect, etc.) and “afflictions” (suggesting what happens when men love, what happens to those whom men love, etc.). She even inserts an assertion that is not a specific riposte to Overbury, but that instead reflects her own aesthetic valuation of religion’s primacy over pleasure’s: “That the plot of saluation was laid before the plot of Paradise” (F4v). The clever Donne proves a more talented opponent for Southwell in this contest of wits, but his disparaging comments about women in “Newes from the very Country” make Southwell’s retorts in “Answer to the very Country newes” that much more satisfying. Donne’s crude contention that women “are not so tender fruit, but that they doe as well and beare as well vpon beds, as plashed against walls” (G2), is answered by a clever trope from Southwell that depends upon images of mercantilism to condemn the sensuality Donne is promoting: “That the fiue Senses are Cinque-ports for temptation, the trafficke sinne, the Lieutenant Sathan, the custome-tribute, soules” (G2v). The man engaging in sensual pleasure for its own sake is not his own agent, according to Southwell, but merely the pawn of Satan, a Faust-like consumer who trades in his own destruction. When Donne attempts

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to mock the family and to rationalize adultery through jokery, however, declaring that “next to no wife and children, your owne wife and children are best pastime, anothers wife and your children worse, your wife and anothers children worst” (G2v), Southwell responds with her most detailed analogy: “That the soule in some is like an egge, hatched by a young pullet, who often rigging from her nest, makes hot and cold beget rottennesse, which her wanton youth will not beleeue, till the faire shell being broken, the stinke appeareth to profit others, but cannot her” (G3). With her play on “rig” as “A wanton girl or woman” (OED), Southwell exposes woman’s complicity in the ruin of her own reputation. All the attention to doing what is expected of her (that is, of tending the nest, of serving as domestic worker) is undone when the “young pullet” succumbs to the temptation of “rigging” (with her periodic absence creating the “cold” that ensures that her efforts will only produce “rottennesse”). In time her “faire shell” gives way, and when she dies, the “soule” inside is discovered to be rotten—which, indeed, can “profit others” who learn from it not to repeat her errors. For her, however, the damage is irredeemable. While Donne is content to sculpt images that are merely humorous treatments of illicit sexuality, Southwell presents spiritual and moral homilies—and the response from readers of those efforts may have provoked her rhetorical question in “Precept.4.,” “what sanctitye can scape from bad opinion”—and her decision not to return to a public forum with her philosophy and writings. Given her appearance in A Wife Now the Widdow of Sir Thomas Overbvrye as a champion of women, and her decision to remain an author in private, it is both ironic and fitting that she should write an epitaph for Frances Howard, Countess of Sommerset: “Heere lyes Interrd a Princly Dame / the Fenix of great Hawardes name / Francis the faire, Spouse to Earle sommersett / to whose true worth all penns doe ly in dett” (35; ll. 36–39). Overbury “composed many of the poems and letters” (DNB) which Robert Carr used to woo Howard, who was then the Countess of Essex, and which succeeded in convincing her to secure a divorce from her husband and to marry Carr. Overbury, however, opposed the match—having considered her appropriate as a mistress, but entirely inappropriate as a wife. What a personal victory for Southwell, then, to write these lines of encomium, after what must have been an unpleasant encounter with Overbury on the printed page, 31 in support of the woman who confessed herself guilty of participating in Overbury’s murder, but who was eventually pardoned for the act and did not die until 1632.

Notes Introduction 1. Elizabeth Colville, Lady Culross, Ane Godlie Dreame, compylit in Scottish meter be M.M. gentlevvoman in Culros, at the requeist of her freindes (Edinburgh: Robert Charteris, 1603), A2v (ll. 34, 42). All subsequent documentation of Colville will cite this edition, and will include page and line references in parentheses. 2. Frances E. Dolan, “Reading, Writing, and Other Crimes,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 160. 3. Lisa Schnell, “‘So Great a Difference Is There in Degree’: Aemilia Lanyer and the Aims of Feminist Criticism,” Modern Language Quarterly 57 (1996): 23. 4. And as Jonathan Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), insists, scholars must realize “that texts by women are not simply ones in which the only thing to be considered is their representation of women” (12–13). 5. For examples, see my discussions of the use of rhetorical violence in the works of John Bunyan (“ ‘This Giant Has Wounded Me as Well as Thee’: Reading Bunyan’s Violence and/as Authority,” in The Witness of Times: Manifestations of Ideology in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Katherine E. Zeller and Gerald J. Schiffhorst [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1993], 218–37; as spiritual authorization and communication of his prison experience); of Sir David Lindsay (“‘To schaw thare reif, thift, murthour, and mischeif’: The Semiosis of Violence in David Lindsay’s Verse,” Acta 16 [1993]: 113–26; as amplification of political advice); and of Richard Crashaw (“‘This foot hath got a Mouth and lippes’: Richard Crashaw’s Bodies and the Poetics of Visceral Piety,” in Semiotics 1990, ed. Karen Haworth et al. [New York: University Press of America, 1991], 133–42; as subjective expression of personal piety). 6. Megan Matchinske, Writing, Gender, and Stage in Early Modern England: Identity Formation and the Female Subject (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11. 7. Creel Froman, Language and Power: Books I and II (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1992), 4. 8. Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 42. 9. Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 20. 10. Mihoko Suzuki, “‘Signorie ouer the Pages’: The Crisis in Authority in Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller,” Studies in Philology 81 (1984): 349. 11. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), xii. 12. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), 9. In speaking of “the violence enacted by poetry,” William Monroe, Power to Hurt: The Virtues of Alienation (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), has similarly suggested that “whatever its power to hurt, it comes

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about through a collaborative performance of readers and writers” that builds upon “exchange and interaction analogous to moments of encounter between flesh-andblood persons” (4). 13. Such “memories” are often associations based in cultural expectations and conditionings rather than necessarily in personal experience, as, for example, in the concept of physical punishment functioning to deter criminal activity, or in the Christian conception of hell as physicalized torment to punish sin. Concerning the “violence of recall,” Francis Barker, The Culture of Violence: Essays on Tragedy and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), observes that a society that is “shot through with violence either loses its memory, or is caught up in a problematisation of memory which tends to suggest that the order and continuity” that official, institutional, or governmental memory “offers apparently to preserve, are themselves in fact violences and forgettings” (86). On the cueing of pain by written or otherwise performed texts, see “The Memory of Pain” in Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 63–71. 14. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 164. 15. Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty, 236. 16. Barbara Whitmer, The Violence Mythos (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 90. 17. Joel B. Altman, “ ‘Vile Participation’: The Amplification of Violence in the Theater of Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 17. 18. Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 23, 76. 19. Teresa de Lauretis, “The Violence of Rhetoric: Considerations on Representation and Gender,” in The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (New York: Routledge, 1989), 240. Cf. Deirdre Lashgari, “To Speak the Unspeakable: Implications of Gender, ‘Race,’ Class, and Culture,” in Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women’s Writing as Transgression, ed. Lashgari (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 3. 20. Anthony Kubiak, Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 63. 21. Marjorie Garber, “Spare Parts: The Surgical Construction of Gender,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 322. 22. Lashgari, “To Speak the Unspeakable,” 2. 23. Whitmer, The Violence Mythos, 58. 24. Gwynne Kennedy, Just Anger: Representing Women’s Anger in Early Modern England (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 15–20. 25. Ibid., 22. 26. An illustration of this appears in the country-house poem, “The Vision. Or A Poeticall View of Ashridge in the County of Bucks. The ancient Seat of the Right Honorable John Earle of Bridgewater. Together with the History & Characters Of the most Considerable Members of that Noble Family. Written by one of the Female Sex in the Year 1699” by Marie Burghope, and sent to Lady Mary Egerton (in Betty S. Travitsky, ed., Subordination and Authorship in Early Modern England: The Case of Eliz-

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abeth Cavendish Egerton and Her “Loose Papers” [Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999], 254). While the poem is prefaced by a letter that does not attempt to curb its anger (“It has been the common Imputation of the Tyrants of the other Sex, that Women had neither Learneing, Prudence nor Conduct, & therefore were fitt only to be the Drudges of Mankind; That they were made up of Passion & Ignorance, & so to be govern’d as a higher Sort of unreasonable Creatures” [247]), it also uses a particularly violent image to take an aesthetic position that condemns both anger and violence. As Burghope describes some Egerton family paintings depicting scenes from Homer’s Iliad, she comes to the image of Hector, degraded in death by Achilles, and speaks of him in terms that might also be employed by a mother or lover, before turning to condemn Achilles’s revenge: Hector was always my dear favorite Care, And therefore fear’d to see Him pass to War. But while He’s drag’d att fierce Achilles Wheel A strang remorse I cannot chuse but feel. This base vnmanly Ation lost Him more, Then all He got with th’ Aid of Gods before. 27. A.-J. Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, trans. Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 78. 28. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 30. 29. John Caius, A Boke or Counseill against the Disease called the Sweate (1552), ed. Archibald Malloch (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1937), iii-vi. 30. David Le Breton, “Dualism and Renaissance: Sources for a Modern Representation of the Body,” Diogenes 142 (1988): 64. 31. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 151. 32. Elizabeth Hanson, “Torture and Truth in Renaissance England,” Representations 34 (1991): 54. 33. Although Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 29–59, refutes the contention that any “truth” is ever guaranteed by such methods. Perhaps the most concise expression of this notion of the body-in-pain as text is the epigram attached to Clive Barker’s short story collection, Books of Blood (New York: Berkley Books, 1986), where wounding is an act of reading (and vice versa): “Everybody is a book of blood; / Wherever we’re opened, we’re red” (ix). Dennis Patrick Slattery, The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), has likened being wounded to being “in a drama, in a narrative”: “To be wounded is to be opened to the world; it is to be pushed off the straight, fixed, and predictable path of certainty and thrown into ambiguity” (13–14). Once the body has been inscribed with meaning, according to Peter Brooks, Body Works: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), it becomes the “scene of discourse” (47) and as a narrative site where particular meanings are encoded through wounding, scarring, and other physical disruptions, “the flesh becomes a text” (75).

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For the purposes of this study, it is important to note, as Cynthia Marshall, “Woundman: Coriolanus, Gender, and the Theatrical Construction of Interiority,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture, ed. Valerie Traub, Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), does, that wounds do not have a single, unambiguous signification once they are encoded in a literary text. She observes that Martius’s wounds, in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, “code the impossibility, and the destructiveness, of philosophy’s appeal to the body as a ground of truth: the symbolic truth of the wounds is their sliding signification, for they serve contradictorily as symbols of valor and of vulnerability” (110). 34. Hanson, “Torture and Truth in Renaissance England,” p. 55. 35. Karen Cunningham, “Renaissance Execution and Marlovian Elocution: The Drama of Death,” PMLA 105 (1990): 209. 36. Ibid., 219. 37. And Sheila Delany, Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth-Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), offers evidence suggesting that this was a long-standing English tradition in her study of the Augustinian friar, Osbern Bokenham, whose texts address three types of bodies: “the corpus of poetic and theological texts he used and critiqued, the female body he represented in his legendary, and the ‘body politic’ of English society at a critical moment in its national life” (4) at the advent of the Wars of the Roses. However, not all scholars ascribe political motives to the increase in embodied narratives, even while acknowledging that they coincide with concerns about authorization and empowerment. Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), for example, resists New Historicist emphasis on “the individual as a victim of the power which circulates through culture” while stressing “the empowerment that Galenic physiology and ethics bestowed upon the individual,” choosing to foreground “the self-control that authorizes individuality. It is about how to fortify a self, not police a state” (11). 38. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984), 23. 39. John Hunt, “A Thing of Nothing: The Catastrophic Body in Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 29. 40. Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 127, 130. See Mark Thornton Burnett, “Tamburlaine and the Body,” Criticism 33 (1991): 31–47, for further application of Bakhtin’s distinctions between the grotesque body and the classical body in application to early modern texts. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed, has located related evidence of this construction of woman in humoral theory, which “offered rational, empirical support for birthing rituals designed to offer concealment and enclosure, for the explanations of danger in childbirth focused precisely on the exposure of the bodily thresholds ordinarily concealed from view and the traumatic opening of bodily thresholds ordinarily closed” (190). The enclosed body as a metaphor for the formation of individual identity has also been treated by Arthur Riss, “The Belly Politic: Coriolanus and the

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Revolt of Language,” ELH 59 (1992), who situates the Midlands Revolt as “the conflict between a communal and private organization of property” in order to see a metaphorical link between the “movement to enclose land” and the “constitution of the individualistic, enclosed self” (55). Cf. the natural body/body politic discussions in Zvi Jagendorf, “Coriolanus: Body Politic and Private Parts,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 455–69; in Gillian Murray Kendall, “Overkill in Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 33–50; in Frank Whigham, “Reading Social Conflict in the Alimentary Tract: More on the Body in Renaissance Drama,” ELH 55 (1988): 333–50; and in Linda Woodbridge, “Palisading the Elizabethan Body Politic,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33 (1991): 327–54. 41. Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England 1550– 1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 26, 29. 42. Helen Wilcox, “ ‘My soule in silence’?: Devotional Representations of Renaissance Englishwomen,” in Representing Women in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University Press of Missouri, 1997), 14. 43. Wendy Wall, “Disclosures in Print: The ‘Violent Enlargement’ of the Renaissance Voyeuristic Text,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 29 (1989): 42. 44. Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (New York: Routledge, 1992), 32. 45. Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 50. 46. Anthology editors have tended to label Dowriche’s poem in one or both of these ways. Marion Wynne-Davies, ed., Women Poets of the Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 1999), challenges the restriction of the former perspective by considering The French Historie as a hybrid of “religious fervour, Biblical allusion, national pride and overt praise for Elizabeth I” (354), while the latter view is epitomized by editor Randall Martin’s description in Women Writers in Renaissance England (New York: Longman, 1997) of “her passionate delight in being able to write in support of militant Protestantism” (25). 47. Mieke Bal, Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre, and Scholarship on Sisera’s Death, trans. Matthew Gumpert (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 96. 48. Kennedy, Just Anger, 116.

1. “On these men what wyll fall”: Reforming Voices in Anne Askew’s Examinations 1. Thomas Betteridge, “Anne Askew, John Bale, and Protestant History,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27 (1997): 265. While Betteridge confirms the courage and skill of Askew’s attempts to challenge the partisan proceedings against her, he does so by creating an artificially adversarial textual relationship between Askew and Bale—even to the degree of ignoring the laudatory tone of Bale’s glosses and the self-conscious litany he composes by repeatedly speaking her full name (e.g., 10–13). Throughout, he overlooks the most salient argument against his reading of Bale’s intentions: Bale did not need to include Askew’s words at all in order simply to

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use her example as a locus of doctrinal/political debate. Over ten years earlier, Bale had enjoyed the protection and patronage of the Earl of Essex, Thomas Cromwell, and the Earl of Oxford, John de Vere, as he wrote anti-Romanist dramas. By the time he saw the Examinations through to publication, the self-exiled Bale had already established his own reputation as religious commentator and could have traded on that reputation without resort to Askew’s text. 2. Elaine V. Beilin, “Anne Askew’s Dialogue with Authority,” in Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of SixteenthCentury England and France, ed. Marie-Rose Logan and Peter L. Rudnytsky (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 313–22. 3. Anne Askew, The Examinations of Anne Askew, ed. Elaine V. Beilin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 106. All subsequent references to Askew’s texts will cite this edition. 4. Beilin comments that the “linguistic games” Askew engages in “convey her as confident and self-possessed in the face of danger, certainly part of the character she wishes to create for her readers” (“Anne Askew’s Self-Portrait in the Examinations,” in Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret Patterson Hannay [Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985]: 87). 5. A. G. Dickens and Dorothy Carr, eds., The Reformation in England to the Accession of Elizabeth I (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1968), 119. 6. Paula McQuade, “ ‘Except that they had offended the Lawe’: Gender and Jurisprudence in The Examinations of Anne Askew,” Literature and History 3 (1994), notes that Askew concludes her narrative “by reassuming her maiden name and thus publicly proclaiming her independent identity” (3). See also Krista Kesselring’s analysis of Bale’s complementary rhetorical spin on Askew’s marital conflict (“Representations of Women in Tudor Historiography: John Bale and the Rhetoric of Exemplarity,” Renaissance and Reformation 22 [1998]: 48–49). 7. Askew is adept at making rhetorical use of male voices. She tells us that Bonner fled this particular interview in rage, and “my cosyne Brittayne desyred hym to take me as a woman, and not to sett my weake womannys wytt, to hys lordshyppes great wysdome” (62). Christopher Brittayn, as an agent for the just cause, employs the same strategy of false modesty that works so well for Askew; she records his words in order to signify her cause’s intellectual base (metonymically, by focusing on a supporter’s resourcefulness). Eventually, Bonner’s resistance was overcome by such strategies, and Askew was bailed following the quest’s inability to trick her into selfincrimination. For Askew’s account of the Kafkaesque bureaucracy Brittany had to contend with while pleading for her release, see 36–37. 8. Occasionally she also incorporates selective memory as part of this strategy. After acknowledging that before leaving Lincoln there were “bent agaynst me, thre score prestes” (56), Askew resists the pressure of Bishop Bonner to concede that they had made certain arguments to her: “I tolde hym, yeas, that there was one of them at the last, whych ded speake to me in dede. And my lorde than asked me, what he sayd? And I tolde hym, hys wordes were of so smal effecte, that I ded not now remembre them” (57). 9. It’s interesting to see Askew choose this strategy, when she might as easily

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have attempted to interpret another portion of the same biblical book and chapter (specifically, 1 Corinthians 14:26) as an ungendered call for equal participation in worship services by all believers. Her option effectively forestalls additional exchanges on the topic by arguing that her accusers have no prima facie evidence to support their implied charge. See McQuade, “Gender and Jurisprudence,” 8. 10. She also undercuts the logic of the heresy for which she is condemned by denying the literal transmutation of communion into “flesh, bloude, and bone. To thys beleve of theirs, saye I naye. For then were our commen Crede false, whych sayth that he sytteth on the ryght hande of God the father almyghtye, and from thens shall come to judge the quyck and the dead. Loo, thys is the heresye that I holde, and for it must suffer the deathe” (140–41). She figuratively disarms her assailants as well by declaring her own death sentence. 11. Dickens and Carr, The Reformation in England, 110. 12. Ibid., 111. 13. The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 4v. 14. Note that Askew does not confront the divines with the issue of priestly conversion of the eucharist, as the anonymous author of Everyman does in the words of the character Five-Wits: “With five wordes he may consecrate / Goddes body in flesshe and blode to make, / And handeleth his Maker bitwene his hande[s]” (in Medieval Drama, ed. David Bevington [Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1975], 958). 15. James Kelsey McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics Under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 227. 16. Ibid. 17. McQuade, “Gender and Jurisprudence,” also suggests a Saul of Tarsus parallel (9), and in a moving appeal to the reader following her torture, Askew explicitly likens her suffering to that of the patriarch Job: Then was I brought to an howse, and layed in a bed, with as werye and payneful bones, as ever had pacyent Job, I thanke my lorde God therof. Then my lorde Chauncellour sent me worde if I wolde leave my opynyon, I shuld want nothynge. If I wolde not, I shuld fourth to Newgate, and so be burned. I sent hym agayne worde, that I wolde rather dye, than to breake my faythe. Thus the lorde open the eyes of their blynde hartes, that the truthe maye take place. Fare wele dere frynde, and praye, praye, praye. (132) 18. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 9. 19. Bale makes this goal explicit in his textual pronouncements concerning the immediate historical impact of Askew’s death: “I dare boldelye saye unto them, that by burnynge Anne Askewe and her .iii. companyons, they have one thousande lesse of their popysh beleve than they had afore” (67). He records a concomitant ineffectuality experienced after the execution by her prosecutors as they tried to reinstate the Catholic church in England (68). 20. Fran C. Chalfant, Ben Jonson’s London: A Jacobean Placename Dictionary (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978), 59.

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21. William Kent, Encyclopaedia of London, 3 rd ed., rev. (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1970), 233. 22. Gamini Salgado, The Elizabethan Underworld (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1977), 176, 178. 23. Andrew Knapp, The Newgate Calendar: Comprising Interesting Memoirs of the Most Notorious Characters Who Have Been Convicted of Outrages on the Laws of England, With Speeches, Confessions, and Last Exclamations of Sufferers (Hartford: Edwin Valentine Mitchell, 1926), 3. 24. Henry Charles Lea, Torture (1866; reprint, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvaia Press, 1973), 142. 25. McQuade, “Gender and Jurisprudence,” 10–11. 26. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 35. 27. Beilin, “Anne Askew’s Self-Portrait,” 89. 28. And, at the same time, as ideologue rather than historian, although in a pseudo-journalistic account of the burning at Smithfield he acknowledges that he has names to attach to only two of Askew’s three fellow sufferers (the name of the priest, John Hemley, was the one “at thys tyme I had not”), and has it on the report of Dutch merchants attending the execution that “the skye abhorrynge so wycked an acte, sodenlye altered coloure, and the cloudes from above gave a thonder clappe” (154). Curiously, John Foxe also misses Hemley’s name and inexplicably is the only author to name a “Nicolas Belenian” as the other male victim. 29. Leslie P. Fairfield, John Bale: Mythmaker for the English Reformation (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1976), 142. 30. Kesselring, “John Bale and the Rhetoric of Exemplarity,” 43. 31. Kesselring, “John Bale and the Rhetoric of Exemplarity,” observes that Bale “uses her bodily weakness, aggravated by the poor food and violent handling she received while imprisoned, to highlight both the unnatural cruelty and the power of God’s grace. It is clear, however, that Bale expects women to be capable of the same emotional, spiritual, and mental strength as their male counterparts” (48). See also Beilin, “Anne Askew’s Self-Portrait,” 84; Kesselring, 51. That Bale believes himself to have been successful in broadcasting Askew with the text of the First Examination is clear in his frequent, litany-like recourse to her name in the second text (see, e.g., 79–86). 32. Hence Bale likens Askew to prophetess Elizabeth Barton (7), who was burned in 1534 for treason, her crime being predictions of dire consequences if King Henry insisted upon his divorce. This may also reflect a larger empowerment agenda for Bale. In their edition of The vocacyon of Johan Bale (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1990), Peter Happé and John N. King note Bale’s attack upon “the Catholic separation of the laity from both saints and clergy, to whom are attributed the supernatural powers of working miracles and interceding for the salvation of souls” (5). 33. Bale explicitly acknowledges the efficacy of rhetorical manipulation while he descries Friar Perin’s use of it to condemn German Reformers: “Wherin he rhetorycallye calleth them, in the hote zele of hys Romysh father, the erronyouse Germanes, subtyle witted heretykes, obstynate adversaryes, newe fangled expositours,

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perverse sacramentaryes, blasphemouse apostataes, wycked wretches, devylysh lyars, lewde lyvers, and abhomynable belevers, with soche other lyke” (68). 34. And with a sardonic allusion to transubstantiation during Holy Communion necessitating a sort of “publyque” sacrifice. Folkloric diabolism of the Jews (e.g., as murderers of Christ) and of the Turks (as traditional enemies of Christianity) is embedded in a related trope for rhetorical amplification, maximizing the emotional impact of the accusation aimed at churchmen like those responsible for Askew’s suffering: “Be ashamed than ye tyrauntes of Englande, that your horryble tyrannyes shuld excede all other, Jewes or Gentyles, turkes or Idolaters” (126–27). Wherever possible, Bale constructs his examples from bibical models or historical precedents, to avoid the accusation of his own bloodthirstiness. So when Askew is wrongly accused of holding a heretical book (and she proves the contrary to the Archdeacon who makes the accusation), Bale responds with violent examples, one from the Bible (Jeremiah 36:21–23), treating King Jehoiakim’s cutting and burning of Jeremiah’s prophecies, and the other from the reign of Antiochus IV (who desecrated the Temple at Jerusalem in 168 b.c.e, precipitating the Maccabean revolt the following year), describing the king’s rending and burning of the “bokes of Gods lawe” (43–44). 35. Kesselring, “John Bale and the Rhetoric of Exemplarity,” 45. 36. The construction of this as a systematic strategy is apparent quite early in the text, as Bale develops an extended parallel of Askew’s sufferings with those of the second century c.e. Christian, Blandina, martyred at Lyons (see, e.g., 10–13). 37. Bale also plays here on the nickname, “Doctor Subtillis,” of arch-scholiast John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308). 38. Beilin includes Foxe’s poem in her edition of the Examinations as Appendix 1 (193). All subsequent references to the poem cite her edition; translations here are my own. 39. The Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), specifically defines socia as “A female partner or associate” (1777). 40. This poem is also included in Beilin’s edition of the Examinations (149–50); all subsequent line references to it will cite this text. Perhaps the simplest example of the continuity between Askew’s prose and poetry is that the lines, “More enemyes now I have. / Than heeres upon my heed” (ll. 25–26) repeat the prose of her Latter Examination: “O lorde, I have more enemyes now, than there be heeres on my heade” (146). 41. Even so, the power of her texts has been denied, both overtly and covertly, by male writers refusing to acknowledge the autonomy of the author or of her influence on the Reformation’s progress. Two twentieth-century examples of scholarly unwillingness to recognize the integrity of the Examinations author are indicative of this trend. In the index to The Reformation in England: The English Schism and Henry VIII, 1509–1547 (1934; reprint, New York: Harper & Row, 1966), G. Constant lists the fiercely independent Askew as “widow of Thomas Kyme” (494), while A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), refuses to see in the Examinations the hand of a highly skilled debater: “Her friend John Lascells, though a somewhat obscure figure, was in all likelihood the real intellectual leader of the group” (194).

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2. Shooting Strong but Never Straight: Queen Elizabeth’s Rhetoric of Altruism and Intimidation 1. Marc Shell, in the preface to his transcription of Elizabeth’s manuscript, Elizabeth’s Glass (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1993), xiv. The manuscript was eventually published in Germany as A Godly Medytacyon of the Christen Sowle (1548) with emendations and additions by John Bale. In 1561, when meeting with William Maitland, the representative of Mary Stuart, Elizabeth contextualized her reluctance to confirm her cousin as successor to the English throne by recalling her parents’ marital discord: “I am not ignorant how dangerous it is to blow these coals. I have good reason, methink, always to forbear to move disputation and doubts concerning this matter. The controversy of marriage, allowed or void, the question of issue, lawful or unlawful, hath been so often and by so many wits canvassed on both sides, while every man favoreth one party or another, that for this cause I have been hitherto the less forward to marriage” (The Public Speaking of Queen Elizabeth: Selections from Her Official Addresses, ed. George P. Rice, Jr. [1951; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1966], 68; cf. Elizabeth I, Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], 60–70). From Elizabeth’s perspective, even to entertain the subject of succession is to encourage the “coals” of factionalism to burst into the flames of political chaos. The following abbreviations will be employed to distinguish this chapter’s most frequently cited sources of Queen Elizabeth’s writings: BD CW EG LEJ LQE PQE PS

A Book of Devotions Composed by Her Majesty Elizabeth, trans. Rev. Adam Fox (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smithe, 1977). Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Marc Shell, Elizabeth’s Glass (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). Letters of Queen Elizabeth and King James VI of Scotland, ed. John Bruce, Camden Society (1849; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1968). Letters of Queen Elizabeth, ed. G. B. Harrison (London: Cassell and Co., Ltd., 1935). The Poems of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. Leicester Bradner (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1964). The Public Speaking of Queen Elizabeth: Selections from Her Official Addresses, ed. George P. Rice, Jr. (1951; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1966).

Subsequent citations of these texts will include abbreviations and page references in parentheses. 2. Sheila Cavanagh, “The Bad Seed: Princess Elizabeth and the Seymour Incident,” in Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana, ed. Julia M. Walker (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 15. 3. Julia M. Walker, “Introduction,” in Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana, ed. Walker (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 3. 4. Ibid., 4. 5. John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. Rev. Stephen Reed Cattley,

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8 vols. (London: R.B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1837–9), 8: 605. All subsequent citations of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments will be to this edition, and will include volume and page references in parentheses. 6. Foxe also garners sympathy for the precarious uncertainties she encountered, as in the depiction of an Elizabeth sitting in the rain outside the Tower, who replies to a lieutenant encouraging her to come inside, “‘It is better sitting here, than in a worse place; for God knoweth, I know not whither you will bring me.’ With that her gentleman-usher wept” (8: 609). 7. Peter E. McCullough, “Out of Egypt: Richard Fletcher’s Sermon before Elizabeth I after the Execution of Mary Queen of Scots,” in Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana, ed. Julia M. Walker (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 128. 8. Puttenham declares it practical for those situations where “we be so hardly prest with our aduersaries, as we cannot deny the fault layd vnto our charge: in which case it is good pollicie to excuse it by some allowable pretext” (The Arte of English Poesie [1589; reprint, Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970], 273). Elizabeth already knows the dangers (physical as well as spiritual) of being monarch; her need to reiterate this in private prayers suggests she is seeking emotional justification for her actions. For other use Elizabeth makes of The Arte of Poesie, see Jennifer Summit, “ ‘The Arte of a Ladies Penne’: Elizabeth I and the Poetics of Queenship,” English Literary Renaissance 26 (1996): 400–408. 9. Constance Jordan, “Woman’s Rule in Sixteenth-Century British Political Thought,” Renaissance Quarterly 40 (1987): 426. 10. Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 13. 11. Cf. these “weeding” metaphors with the one contained in a letter to James written in late October 1594: “Wedes in fildes, if the be suffred, wil quickly ouergrowe the corne, but subiectz, being dandeled, wil make ther owne raignes, and for-let an other raigne” (LEJ 109). The implication is that while subjects may seem to be weedlike, they are in fact something more like symbiotes, or beneficial parasites, and their cultivation is in the monarch’s best interest. 12. Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 2: 107. 13. For explicit examples of Elizabeth selecting peaceful responses when threatened with violence, see the first English Prayer (BD 19) and the French Prayer (BD 23) in her Book of Devotions; her 5 November 1566 address on marriage and succession to a gathering of representatives from both the House of Lords and the House of Commons (CW 93–98); and the 1569 “state of the nation” address read from the pulpits of all English churches in response to the Northern Rebellion (PS 128, 131–32). Even these passages are constructed to allow for the possibility of violent response if threats escalate, as in Tudor Proclamation 798, “Declaring Reasons for Sending Army into Ireland”: “divers of our subjects, both of the better sort and of the meaner (abusing our lenity to their advantage), have unnaturally and without all ground or cause offered by us forgotten their allegiance and rebelliously taking arms have committed many bloody and violent outrages upon our loyal subjects. And although their own consciences can bear them witness that both by us, and by our ministers there, more ways have been attempted to reclaim them by clemency, for avoiding of bloodshed, than

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is usual with princes that have so good means to reduce them by other means” (3: 200; my emphasis). 14. The Geneva Bible, 41. 15. Hanson, “Torture and Truth in Renaissance England,” 61–62. 16. This is not a reference to George Ker, another messenger who was tortured after being intercepted while carrying evidence of the “Spanish Blanks” conspiracy, empty sheets signed by a number of prominent Scots and addressed to the king of Spain, later to be filled in toward the mustering of thirty thousand Spanish troops who would sail to Scotland and there be joined by fifteen thousand Scots retainers (see LEJ 71). 17. However, when in the same letter the boot is on the other foot, so to speak, the practice of torture once again becomes a necessary evil: “Now of late by a fortunate good hap a lewd fellow hath been apprehended with letters and instructions: I pray God he be so well handled as he may confess all his knowledge in the Spanish conspiracy and that you use not this man as slightly as you have done the ringleaders of this treason. I vow if you do not rake it to the bottom”—an allusion, presumably, to turning the wheel on the rack as far as it will go—”you will verify what many a wise man hath (viewing your proceedings) judged of your guiltiness of your own wrack” (CW 367). Cf. Elizabeth’s advice in a letter (18 November 1569) to Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, regarding the forces led by the rebel Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland: “lay diligent wait for the intercepting of all espials or any other seditious person that might privily, or by any colourable means, resort to your side to stir any mutiny amongst those that serve under you; of which sort of people, if any such may be come by, you shall do well by the speedy execution of two or three of them to make an example of terror to others of their nature and quality” (LQE 61; my emphasis); and her note to Sir John Perrot, Lord Deputy of Ireland, 14 April 1586: “Let us have no more such rash unaduised journeys without good ground, as your last fond journey in the North. We maruel that you hanged not for such a saucy advertiser as he that made you belieue so great a company were coming” (LQE 175). 18. While the emphasis in this chapter is on reading Elizabeth’s use of rhetorical violence as a conscious argumentative strategy, I should note that it was undoubtedly aided by popular belief in the Queen’s ability to deliver such violence. Carole Levin, “Power, Politics, and Sexuality: Images of Elizabeth I,” in The Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jean R. Brink, Allison P. Coudert, and Maryanne C. Horowitz (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth-Century Journal Publications, 1989), 95–110, and Mary Villepointeaux, “ ‘Not as women wonted be’: Spenser’s Amazon Queen,” in Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana, ed. Julia M. Walker (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 215–16, for example, have discussed the pervasiveness of folk rumors about Elizabeth’s engagement in infanticide, and even popular representations of the Queen (see Julia M. Walker, “Bones of Contention: Posthumous Images of Elizabeth and Stuart Politics,” in Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana, ed. Walker [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998], 252–76), like Thomas Cecil’s “Truth Presents the Queen with a Lance” (c. 1622), associate her with the exercise of force (e.g., against the Roman church and Catholic believers). 19. Another version of this same speech—endorsed by William Cecil, Lord Burghley’s hand—refers to the urging of the marriage and succession issues by both

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Houses of Parliament as “a traitorous trick” and fleshes out the “snaffling” allusion: “I marvel not much that bridleless colts do not know their rider’s hand, whom bit of kingly rein did never snaffle yet” (CW 93). 20. Cf. the veiled threats in her letter of January the following year (CW 267– 69). The Queen believes in leaving nothing to chance, as she reflects in her couplet, “On Fortune”: “Never think you fortune can bear the sway / Where virtue’s force can cause her to obey” (PQE 5). 21. Tudor Royal Proclamations, 2: 101. 22. Another passage in Elizabeth’s “interpretive translation” calculated to display vulnerability is her confession that “I am much less than nothing: before my birth, mire, and after, a dunghill, a body ready and prompt to do all evil, not willing other study; also subject to care, sorrow, and pain, a short life and the end uncertain, which under sin by Adam is sold and by the law judged to be hanged” (EG 115). Cf. the Greek prayer in her Book of Devotions: “when I remember all the errors and trespasses of my own life from my youth up, I am afraid, I am ashamed, I am full of despondency” (BD 39). Notice, too, how Elizabeth turns such humility to her defense in Foxe’s account of her shaming of her jailors (8: 607–8). 23. If, as is widely accepted, this poem refers to the failure of the negotiations surrounding the Alençon courtship (1579–83), Elizabeth soon turned this personal pathos to public account, for it “made it possible to argue for the first time that by reigning as England’s perpetually virgin queen, Elizabeth could escape the political compromises necessitated by the marriages of her kindred monarchs, Mary I and Mary, Queen of Scots” (Jon N. King, “Queen Elizabeth I: Representations of the Virgin Queen,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 [1990]: 58). Elizabeth may also have made such strategies pay off by finding alternative outlets for her frustrations with her subjects. In their edition of her translation of Seneca’s Hercules Oetaeus, S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents [New York: Routledge, 1996]) suggest that the work’s first choral interlude “would seem especially compelling for Elizabeth because it explores the theme of the disloyalty of subjects to their leaders and the treachery of public office” (8). Lines 27–28 of the translation might be read as a footnote to her public face of stoicism: “The love of kingdom’s rule observed with care, / But for himself a king but few regard” (11). 24. Katherine Eggert, Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 13. 25. Theodora A. Jankowski, Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 144. 26. Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3: 252. 27. For the variations on the Tilbury speech—provided in a sermon by William Leigh (pub. 1612), below a painting, dated 1588, commissioned by Thomas Hare (1572–1634), and in BM Harleian MS 6798, article 18—wherein the theme of altruistic, threatened majesty is continued, see Susan Frye, “The Myth of Elizabeth at Tilbury,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 23 (1992): 101–4, and Janet M. Green, “‘I My Self’: Queen Elizabeth I’s Oration at Tilbury Camp,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 28 (1997): 421–43. Cf. Lisa Gim, “ ‘Faire Eliza’s Chaine: Two Female Writers’ Literary Links

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to Queen Elizabeth I,” in Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England, ed. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), however, as she examines Diana Primrose’s reinterpretation of the Tilbury speech as an exercise of power, of Elizabeth’s “traversal of gender roles and the link between the queen and her nation” (191). 28. Young Elizabeth’s recognition of the desirability of cultivating an audience by voicing her concerns in common with it may be suggested in “The Thirteenth Psalm of David,” included at the end of the Godly Medytacyon (1548), and termed a “free paraphrase” of the biblical Psalm by editor Leicester Bradner (PQE 79). Perhaps already anticipating the prospect of Catholic retribution lying ahead, Elizabeth makes a reference to those who deny God’s existence that is equally applicable to those who acknowledge it but commit violence on sectarian grounds: In heart and tongue have they deceit, Their lips throw forth a poisoned bait. Their minds are mad, their mouths are wode, And swift they be in shedding blood. So blind they are, no truth they know, No fear of God in them will grow. How can that cruel sort be good, Of God’s dear flock which suck the blood? (PQE 13) 29. Gail Kern Paster, “‘In the spirit of men there is no blood’: Blood as Trope of Gender in Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 284. 30. The Queen implies in a subsequent letter that James should resort to torture to elicit more information since Gray still hasn’t confessed “who bade him talke with Morgan of the price of my bloude, wiche he knowes, I am assured, right wel; nor yet hathe named the man that shuld be the murtherar of my life. . . . [A]ccordinge to the bond of nature and the promes of strikte frindeship, let me coniure you that this vilanye may be confest. I hope I may stand you in bettar sted than that you wyl shew you uncareful of suche a treason” (LEJ 12–13). 31. For another example of such reciprocal wounding, see “The Glass of the Sinful Soul”: the narrator justifies her speaking of God as her “brother,” and then declares “Alas, good brother, I wish for nothing else but that in wounding Thee I might find myself wounded with Thy love” (EG 121). 32. Exercised to signify the instabilities both of others and of herself. To Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, Lord Deputy of Ireland, she condemns the augmentation of the Earl of Tyrone’s rebels by Spanish forces, in a letter dated 4 October 1601: “Since this brainsick humor of unadvised assault hath seized on the hearts of our causeless foes, we doubt not but their gain will be their bane, and glory their shame, that ever they had the thought thereof” (LQE 288; cf. the almost identical rhetoric in the letter to James dated August 1588 [CW 357–58]). However, she also directs a variation on this to Blount himself, in a later letter replying to his concerns about not being sufficiently supported at home: “O what melancholy humor hath exhaled up into your brain from a full fraughted heart that should breed such doubt bred

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upon no cause given by us at all, never having pronounced any syllable upon which such a work should be framed” (LQE 289). Love and separation combine to inspire the Queen to depict her own disorientation and excess of melancholic humor in a letter written in French (14 May 1582) to Anjou, following his departure: “So much, my dearest, the happy arrival of Monsieur de Bacqueville has aroused my spirit that I suppose myself to have had the melancholic malady that often makes some believe themselves headless, others that they are stripped of sight, and others that they are dead altogether. So I cannot hide from you the evident reasons that lead me to think myself out of this world” (CW 251–52). 33. Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3: 90. 34. Christopher Hibbert, The Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I, Genius of the Golden Age (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1991), 165–66. 35. A 4 May 1568 letter from Elizabeth to Frederick II of Denmark, requesting extradition of the imprisoned Bothwell who had been intercepted by a Danish ship and arrested, displays the Queen’s dislike of both Bothwell and Mary: see Elizabethan England and Europe: Forty Unprinted Letters from Elizabeth I to Protestant Powers, ed. E. I. Kouri (London: University of London Institute of Historical Research, 1982), 26. 36. Hibbert, The Virgin Queen, 167. 37. Jennifer Summit, “ ‘The Arte of a Ladies Penne,’” 411. 38. She informs the committees of both Houses “that you may the better perceive how maliciously I have proceeded against her, I will declare a matter unto you wherein I shall become a blab” (CW 187), and proceeds to outline the opportunities she afforded Mary to cooperate in the exposure of the conspiracies mounted against her, “Which offer of mine she utterly refused and steadfastly denied her guiltiness therein” (CW 187). The Queen insinuates herself to her audience by making them privy to information she implies is secret and by the ingenuousness of her candid “blab” self-reference (see Summit, “‘The Arte of a Ladies Penne,’” 413), completing the association with her subjects that she has already implied with the linking of their blood to hers. Cf. the first-person directive of Tudor Proclamation 685, “Declaring Sentences against Mary, Queen of Scots”: “in very truth we were greatly and deeply grieved in our mind to think or imagine that any such unnatural and monstrous acts should be either devised or willingly assented unto against us by her, being a princess born, and of our sex and blood, and one also whose life and honor we had many times before saved and preserved” (2: 528). 39. Note the related assertions in version one of this speech, where Elizabeth acknowledges that while “there be some which will not stick to shed their own blood for the sake and defense of their kin” (CW 196), her own clemency toward “many traitors and rebels” must be read to signify “mine actions have not been such as should procure me the name of a tyrant” (CW 197). 40. In a letter to James VI dated 4 October 1586, Elizabeth alludes to Mary’s knowledge of the Babington Conspiracy, uncovered on 3 August, its primary figures executed 20–21 September: “but such iniquity woll not be hid, be it never so craftily handled. And yet when you shall hear all, you will wonder that one accounted wise will use such matter so fondly. But no marvel, for when they are given to a reprobate sense, they often make such slip” (CW 287). For the arguments the Queen offered to James for putting his mother to death, see her letters circa February 1587 (CW

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293–97); see also Allison Heisch, “Queen Elizabeth I: Parliamentary Rhetoric and the Exercise of Power,” Signs 1 (1975): 31–55. 41. She offers her own assessment of this at the close of Parliament, 1585: “I am supposed to have many studies, but most philosophical. I must yield this to be true: that I suppose few (that be no professors) have read more” (CW 182).

3. Tragic Past and Present Danger: Anne Dowriche’s The Fr ench Historie 1. The three conflicts, according to the text’s subtitle, are: The outrage called The winning of S. Iames his Streete, 1557; The constant Martirdome of Annas Burgaeus one of the K. Councell, 1559; The bloodie Marriage of Margaret Sister to Charles the 9. Anno 1572. Since the edition of The French Historie in Marion Wynne-Davies’s anthology, Women Poets of the Renaissance, is the most complete and regularized to date but does not include Dowriche’s front matter or a number of passages that are important for this chapter’s discussion, and because I was unable to reconcile my own line numberings for the original poem with those in the anthology, all subsequent citations of the anthologized text in this chapter will include line numbers, while citations of portions of the original not included in the anthology will include page references. 2. Tudor Royal Proclamations, 2: 469. A series of proclamations accompanied, and perhaps helped to stimulate, the Catholic plots that followed during the next decade: Proclamations 655 [1581] (“Ordering Return of Seminarians, Arrest of Jesuits”), 660 [1582] (“Declaring Jesuits and Non-Returning Seminarians Traitors”), 672 [1584] (“Ordering Suppression of Books Defacing True Religion, Slandering Administration of Justice, Endangering Queen’s Title, etc.”), 680 [1586] (“Explaining Execution of Two Seminary Priests”), 683 [1586] (“Ordering Arrest of Babington Conspirators”), 688 [1587] (“Suppressing Seditious Rumors”), and 699 [1588] (“Ordering Martial Law against Possessors of Papal Bulls, Books, Pamphlets”). See Tudor Royal Proclamations, 2: 481–84, 488–91, 506–8, 518–21, 525–26, 534–35; and 3:13–17. 3. Adrian Morey, The Catholic Subjects of Elizabeth I (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978), 81–82. 4. Dowriche announces in the dedicatory letter to her brother that the poem “hath beene my ordinarie exercise for recreation at times of leasure for a long space togeather ” (A2v; my emphasis). 5. The Geneva Bible, 91. 6. The construction of this poem may well have been suggested by the acrostic poem Tymme wrote to his text’s dedicatee, Sir Richard Baker (A1v), although his short, irregular lines have none of the accomplishment of Dowriche’s fluid fourteeners in the poem to her brother. The similar use of fourteeners in the uncredited acrostic poem to the dedicatee, Valentine Knightley, of Hugh Dowriche’s The Iaylors Conuersion. Wherein is liuely represented, the true image of a Soule rightlye touched, and conuerted by the Spirit of God. The waightie circumstances of which supernaturall worke, for the sweete amplifications, and fit applications to the present time, are now set downe for the comfort of the strong, and confirmation of the weake (London: Iohn Windet, 1596),

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suggests that Anne Dowriche wrote this poem for her husband’s text as well as the one following it, “Verses written by a Gentlewoman, vpon the Iaylors Conuersion,” which is signed “A.D.” 7. Mieke Bal, Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre, and Scholarship on Sisera’s Death, trans. Matthew Gumpert (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 96. 8. Though there is also some evidence that Dowriche’s poem may have influenced the direction of Marlowe’s play; see Randall Martin, “Anne Dowriche’s The French History, Christopher Marlowe, and Machiavellian Agency,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 39 (1999): 69–87. She continues to treat the theme of “heroic suffering” in “Verses written by a Gentlewoman, vpon The Iaylors Conuersion” for her husband Hugh’s book, opening “The man is blest who can indure,” and reassuring the reader that “The rod that doth correct our life, / And sinful waies reproue, / Is said, to be a certaine signe, / Of Gods eternall loue” (ll. 1, 9–12; no page reference). In noting her impulse (generally speaking) toward deemphasizing violence in her texts, I should add that she is also entirely subjective about which examples from her source text to exclude from her own—like the group of Huguenots who repel attacking Catholics when besieged by guns and cannons: “when the people ranne with haste into the houses through the holes of the walles which they had made with Gunnes and other weapons, the faythfull shotte at them with Crossebowes, by force whereof many of them being slaine, the myndes of the other were so discouraged, that by and by the whole multitude ranne away, and great quietnesse was made throughout the whole Citie” (Thomas Tymme, trans., The Three Partes of Commentaries, Containing the whole and perfect discourse of the Ciuill warres of Fraunce, vnder the raignes of Henry the second, Frances the second, and of Charles the ninth. With an Addition of the cruell Murther of the Admirall Chastilion, and diuers other Nobles, committed the 14. daye of August. Anno 1572 [London: Frances Coldocke, 1574], Book One, C2). Despite the victory this describes, Dowriche eschews such examples because they promote, rather than condemn, an ethos of retaliation. 9. The perversity of King Henry II’s opposition to Burgaeus and the “seed of Luthers sect” (l. 723) is signalled by his use of healing metaphors to threaten violence: “We doubt not for these bleeding wounds some healing salve to find. / Such tools we have in store to fell this rotting moot, / That quickly shall pull up and raise the branches with the root” (ll. 720–22). The metaphors supposedly referencing the damaged body politic are quickly revealed as rationales co-opted for literal violence as Burgaeus’s fellow senators witness him clapped “in linkes and irons fast, / Which sodaine fall did sore appall, & make the rest agast” (D4v). 10. An extended example of this same pattern details the extreme cruelty of Mandelot, the governor of Lyons, “a black and bloody thief” (l. 1938) who imprisons his town’s Protestants in order to expedite their annihilation. He orders the town hangman “to enter in with axe to kill them all,” but the hangman refuses: “‘For I will not defile my hands with guiltless blood’” (ll. 1954, 1957). A group of soldiers similarly resist the governor’s will, labeling his intention “‘murder’” (l. 1967). Signifying unrestrained male aggression, the town’s butchers finally agree to perform the governor’s behest and “with their bloody butchering knives like tigers” (l. 1978) and “hellhounds” (l. 1982) commit heinous acts of violence: some “They killed not,

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but did their hands cut off at first, / And after chopped in savage sort with blood to quench their thirst” (ll. 1985–6). These abominations far exceed what even sectarian opponents can rationalize (“Papists did lament to see this cruel sight; / And some that loved the Pope these dealings did detest, / Who for their credit did not think this rigour to be best” [ll. 1998–2000]), and Dowriche emphatically argues that the consequences affect both the officially “guilty” and the innocent: “mournful mothers wept whom nature did compel / To see these hounds before their face their loving babes to quell”; and yet “many women of the town devoid of crime / With horror of this sudden feat, had child before their time” (ll. 1989–90, 2001–2). For the original account of the Mandelot atrocities, see Tymme, The Three Partes of Commentaries, Book 10, D3, F1-F2v. 11. Mary Carruthers, “Reading with Attitude, Remembering the Book,” The Book and the Body, ed. Dolores Warwick Frese and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1997), 3. 12. She further chooses “wooden” rather than “golden” to devalue the faith of the persecutors, as the memory association more likely to be recalled here without that designation is the account of the golden calf in Exodus 32:1–10—though still useful to Dowriche, since God specifically tells Moses in the passage not to interfere with his retribution against Aaron and his followers. 13. Though it is significant that she stops short of the powerful message of verses 38–39, which admonish the believer that “he that taketh not his crosse, & followeth after me, is not worthie of me,” promising that “he that loseth his life for my sake, shal saue it” (The Geneva Bible, 6v). Her decision to exclude this would seem to support the reading that Dowriche is more concerned with constructing an argument against sectarian risings and reprisals than with attempting to justify martyrdom or to validate the sacrifices of the Huguenots. 14. Martin, “Machiavellian Agency,” 72. 15. The recurrence of these images in other descriptions of the Guisan agents’ cruelty creates the cumulative effect of a refrain, the reiteration contributing to the reader’s visualization/imagination of them: “In great triumphing joy of this their warlike feat, / The bodies slain from windows high they throw into the street, / So that there was no way,”—for the reader as well as for the poem’s characters—”no lane or passage by, / Where murdered men you might not see in heaps together lie” (ll. 1841–44). 16. See also ll. 2180–99, 2201–4. A possible model for the versifying of these pejorative exempla is once again in Tymme, The Three Partes of Commentaries, Book 2, P1-P1v, where Dowriche would have read examples like this: Charles a Tyrant King, of all kings that before him went, Most craftily by counsell against Christ, his force he bent, Till that his foolish madnesse, of children being espied, In midst of all his mischiefe, most soudenly he died. 17. Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 194. 18. An intriguing divergence between Dowriche and her de Serres/Tymme source may provide further evidence of her specific rhetorical focus in The French Historie. The historical chronicle implies that the death of Francis II is somehow

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a prejudgment on the massacre the Guisans are preparing to orchestrate, since it occurs “while the bloudie slaughter was a preparing”: “For the king had a certaine paine and disease in his eares: Of the which, after he had been sicke a while, he died, the fifth day of December in the yeare of our Lord God. M.D.L.X. At the which sodeine alteration the Guises were not a litle dismaide” (The Three Partes of Commentaries, Book 2, O4v). Dowriche, however, does not treat the death because Francis was not guilty of the high-profile persecutions associated with either his father or his younger brother. 19. S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, eds., Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents (New York: Routledge, 1996), 157. 20. Elaine V. Beilin, “Writing Public Poetry: Humanism and the Woman Writer,” Modern Language Quarterly 51 (1990): 261. 21. Beilin, “Writing Public Poetry,” suggests that Satan in The French Historie is a purely fictional creation—that is, an intentionally fictionalized figure created by Dowriche not to communicate spiritual reality (the “real” Satan), but instead to disseminate “a political reality,” to “bring history into the realm of fiction as a means of writing down her ‘truth’” (260). 22. Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 167–68. 23. Tymme’s translation provides the general shape of these accusations: “diuers rumors were euery where spred, namely that ye Lutherans did assemble them selues togither in the night, and being on a heape togither without candle light, did fulfill their wandring lusts one with another, killed their young infants, and committed other wickednesses” (The Three Partes of Commentaries, Book 1, A4). 24. Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994), 133. 25. Ibid., 134. 26. Dowriche is also capable of mocking the very exercise of rhetorical violence, as when she has Satan introduce an infection metaphor to ironic effect: “‘There is a subtle vein that feeds this cankered sore, / For now the deeper it is lanced it riseth still the more. / We see that fire and sword cannot at all prevail; / We see that all our bloody broils their courage cannot quail’” (ll. 1085–88). 27. Randall Martin, “Anne Dowriche’s The French History and Innocent Gentillet’s Contre-Machiavel,” Notes and Queries 44 (1997): 41. 28. Beilin, “Writing Public Poetry,” 259. 29. On Dowriche’s self-conscious allusions to Machiavelli in the poem and their functions, see Martin, “Anne Dowriche’s The French History and Innocent Gentillet’s Contre-Machiavel,” 41–42; and “Machiavellian Agency,” 75–83. 30. Martin, “Machiavellian Agency,” 80.

4. “When this sweet of-spring of thy body dies”: Aemilia Lanyer’s Polemical Passion 1. Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 179.

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2. Barbara K. Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 219. 3. Lynette McGrath, “ ‘Let Us Have Our Libertie Againe’: Amelia Lanier’s 17thCentury Feminist Voice,” Women’s Studies 20 (1992): 341. 4. See Susanne Woods’s introduction to her edition of Salve Deus Rex Judæorum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), xv-xli, for a model of the extent to which Lanyer’s life has been reconstructed from existing documents. Cf. Barbara K. Lewalski, “Of God and Good Women: The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer,” in Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret Patterson Hannay (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985), 204–6, and “Old Renaissance Canons, New Women’s Texts: Some Jacobean Examples,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 138 (1994): 399–400; and Marion Wynne-Davies, ed., Women Poets of the Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 1999), 358–60. All subsequent citations of Lanyer’s work will be to Woods’s edition, and will include line references for her verse, and page references for her prose, in parentheses. 5. The work’s most polemical statement of thesis appears in the prose “To the Vertuous Reader” (48): And this have I done, to make knowne to the world, that all women deserve not to be blamed though some forgetting they are women themselves, and in danger to be condemned by the words of their owne mouthes, fall into so great an errour, as to speake unadvisedly against the rest of their sexe; which if it be true, I am perswaded they can shew their owne imperfection in nothing more: and therefore could wish (for their owne ease, modesties, and credit) they would referre such points of folly, to be practised by evill disposed men, who forgetting they were borne of women, nourished of women, and that if it were not by the means of women, they would be quite extinguished out of the world, and a finall ende of them all, doe like Vipers deface the wombes wherein they were bred, onely to give way and utterance to their want of discretion and goodnesse. 6. Edward Gosynhill, The praise of all women, called Mulierum Paean. In Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640, ed. Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus (Chicago: Illinois University Press, 1985), 165. 7. Ibid., 169. 8. Cultivating rapport with her readers through modesty, Lanyer is careful not to make the claim that the poem is a product of her own creativity, offering at one point to explain the project’s inspiration in Fate, “That starre that guides us even untill our death. / And guided me to frame this worke of grace, / Not of it selfe, but by celestiall powres” (“To the Ladie Katherine Countesse of Suffolke,” ll. 6–8). In the prose conclusion “To the doubtfull Reader,” she explains that the title for her work first appeared in a dream some years earlier and was forgotten until she had completed the poem: “thinking it a significant token, that I was appointed to performe this Worke, I gave the very same words I received in sleepe as the fittest Title I could devise for this Booke” (139). To protect her efforts from seeming too audacious or subversive, she regularly reiterates that her authority is derived solely

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from her subject: “the Weaker thou doest seeme to be / In Sexe, or Sence, the more his Glory shines, / That doth infuze such powerfull Grace in thee, / To shew thy Love in these few humble Lines” (ll. 289–92). 9. Barbara Bowen, “Aemilia Lanyer and the Invention of White Womanhood,” in Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England, ed. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 277–78. 10. Most frequently in Lanyer studies, critics have asserted that the fostering and embracing of female community is the poet’s most effective method of addressing male hegemony, as she promotes a gynocentric structure that exists apart from male influence. One of the most interesting arguments developing from such readings is Naomi J. Miller’s (“[M]other Tongues: Maternity and Subjectivity” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998]) that sees Lanyer’s separation of women from men as representing religious devotion “in relation to female homosocial bonds.” Christ becomes “a divine focal point” for a worship that “excludes all earthly men, from Adam to Pilate. Rather than remaining fixed in the male gaze as objects of desire, then, the community of women” create a group identity as female worshippers. This shared focus “exhibits the potential not only to liberate them from the sexualized foreclosure of female subjectivity implicit in earthly heterosexual relations, but also to connect them with one another in spiritual homosocial bonding” (149). 11. This is a rationalization as much as a rhetorical reconfiguration, for Lanyer had tasted enough of court life as daughter and wife of court musicians to know its pettiness and its attraction, its risks and its rewards. When she recounts the sorrows of Mary over the death of her son, she includes Mary’s own related loss of worldly prestige: “To see his bleeding body oft shee swouned; / How could shee choose but thinke her selfe undone, / He dying, with whose glory shee was crowned? / None ever lost so great a losse as shee, / Beeing Sonne, and Father of Eternitie” (ll. 1012–16). Despite her leveling arguments throughout the text, Lanyer laments being separated from her powerful friend, the Countess of Cumberland, in “The Description of Cooke-ham”: “Unconstant Fortune, thou art most too blame, / Who casts us downe into so lowe a frame: / Where our great friends we cannot dayly see, / So great a diffrence is there in degree” (ll. 103–6). Cf. Barbara Lewalski, “Re-writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer,” The Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991): 99–101. 12. See, e.g., Susanne Woods, “Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson: Patronage, Authority, and Gender,” The Ben Jonson Journal: Literary Contexts in the Age of Elizabeth, James and Charles 1 (1994): 15–30. 13. While acknowledging that Lanyer is, as Leeds Barroll has expressed it, “competing in a very tough arena, against accomplished male poets (already priviledged because of their gender)” (“Looking for Patrons,” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998], 42), a number of Lanyer scholars have problematized the examination of gender issues without concomitant analysis of class conflicts in Salve Deus Rex Judæorum. Lisa Schnell, “‘So Great a Difference Is There in Degree’: Aemilia Lanyer and the Aims of Feminist Criticism,” Modern Language Quarterly 57 (1996), for example, be-

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lieves that Lanyer, in addressing her potential patronesses, “is marginalized—selfconsciously, it seems—both as a woman and as a member of a socially inferior class group” (26). Su Fang Ng, “Aemilia Lanyer and the Politics of Praise,” ELH 67 (2000), joins in arguing that exclusive emphasis on feminist issues in discussion of Lanyer’s work may cause scholars to “lose sight of important class tensions within the poem” and “obscure the complexity” of it “as she negotiates the patron-client relationship” (434). Shannon Miller, “‘Mirrours More Then One’: Edmund Spenser and Female Authority in the Seventeenth Century,” in Worldmaking Spenser in the Early Modern Age, ed. Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), has suggested that Lanyer directs her text’s dedication to “a mulitiplicity of patrons” because she “divides the form of influence each woman has on the text,” manipulating the superior class status of the dedicatees to her advantage, with the effect that different women, though most particularly Queen Anne and Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, appear at moments to be the “primary patron” of the work (137–38). 14. Cf. Richard Crashaw’s “On Our Crucified Lord, Naked and Bloody”: paradoxically clothed and naked, the crucified Jesus is cloaked in the “purple wardrobe of thy side. / O never could be found Garments too good / For thee to wear, but these, of thine owne blood” (The Complete Poems of Richard Crashaw, ed. George Walton Williams [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1970], 24). 15. Toward achieving the same end, Jane Anger, her Protection for Women (1589) reorients the traditional argument of Eve’s inferiority by virtue of her creation occurring subsequent to Adam’s. In its argument, God created Adam “of dross and filthy clay,” effecting “the transformation of the dust which was loathsome” until “it became purified. Then lacking a help for him, God, making woman of man’s flesh that she might be purer than he, doth evidently show how far we women are more excellent than men” (in Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640, ed. Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus [Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985], 180–81). Lanyer echoes this in writing of Eve, “If any Evill did in her remaine, / Beeing made of him, he was the ground of all” (ll. 809–10). The effect of the crucifixion, however, becomes in her own argument doubly liberating for women; it benefits all of sinful humanity, but also releases women from the associative guilt of Eve, announcing to men “now your indiscretion sets us free, / And makes our former fault much lesse appeare” (ll. 761–62). Cf. Achsah Guibbory, “The Gospel According to Aemilia: Women and the Sacred,” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 200; and Susanne Woods, “Women at the Margins in Spenser and Lanyer,” in Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age, ed. Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 108–9. 16. One of the most damning depictions of male motivations and values appears in a description of what ultimately concerns Pilate most about the crucifixion of Christ: Three feares at once possessed Pilates heart; The first, Christs innocencie, which so plaine appeares; The next, That he which now must feele this smart,

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Is Gods deare Sonne, for any thing he heares: But that which proov’d the deepest wounding dart, Is Peoples threat’nings, which he so much feares, That he to Cæsar could not be a friend, Unlesse he sent sweet JESUS to his end. (ll. 913–20) Entirely discounting the question of Christ’s innocence or godhead, what Pilate worries most about is public image—particularly the approval of Caesar, the man occupying the highest rank in the social hierarchy. 17. Thereby recalling as well the nine dedicatees of her poem: Queen Anne (“To the Queenes most Excellent Majestie”); Princess Elizabeth (“To the Lady Elizabeths Grace”); Arbella, or Arabella, Stuart (“To the Ladie Arabella”); Susan Bertie (“To the Ladie Susan, Countesse Dowager of Kent, and Daughter to the Duchesse of Suffolke”); Mary Sidney (“The Authors Dreame to the Ladie Marie, the Countesse Dowager of Pembrooke ”); Lucie, Countess of Bedford (“To the Ladie Lucie, Countesse of Bedford”); Margaret Clifford (“To the Ladie Margaret Countesse Dowager of Cumberland”); Katherine Howard (“To the Ladie Katherine Countesse of Suffolke”); and Anne Clifford (“To the Ladie Anne, Countesse of Dorcet”). To achieve the illusion of reciprocating her patronesses’ generous investment in her, Lanyer regularly invokes her power to summon Christ, the gift of infinite value, for their perusal. To the Countess of Cumberland, “I present unto you even our Lord Jesus himselfe, whose infinit value is not to be comprehended within the weake imagination or wit of man” (“To the Ladie Margaret . . . ,” ll. 6–9). She is invited later (according to the marginal gloss) “with the eie of Faith” to witness the spectacle of Christ’s “bloodlesse body cold”: “Those eies waxe dimme that gave us all our light, / His count’nance pale, yet still continues sweet, / His blessed blood watring his pierced feet” (ll. 1169,1173–76). Her daughter, Anne Clifford, is similarly compensated for her interests in the poet: “to you (good Madame) I present / His lovely love, more worth than purest gold, / Who for your sake his pretious blood hath spent, / His death and passion here you may behold” (“To the Ladie Anne . . . ,” ll. 113–16). 18. She is figuring resistance here to a socially approved feminine response to death (equally applicable to Christ and to Philip Sidney) that construes “the herodeity as timebound, suffering, passive, publicly silent” by countering it with images of “the hero-deity as timeless, potent, judicial” (Boyd Berry, “‘Pardon . . . though I have digrest’: Digression as Style in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998], 228). 19. At the same time, Lisa Schnell, “Aemilia Lanyer and the Aims of Feminist Criticism,” has justly asserted that while considerable attention has been paid to discursive construction elsewhere, “the most prominent work on early modern writers emphasizes women’s ‘experience’ rather than their rhetorical presence in a text” (24), effectively implying a commonality of theme or approach that denies “the power of difference between women” (25). Su Fang Ng, “Aemilia Lanyer and the Politics of Praise,” argues that Schnell errs too far in constructing a problematic reading of Lanyer to balance interpretations of her positive feminism (443–45), but

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I agree with Schnell that there needs to be more study of the rhetorical strategies employed by the poet in Salve Deus Rex Judæorum. For examples of rhetorical strategies devised or coopted by Lanyer for the purpose of self-authorization, see Kari Boyd McBride, “Remembering Orpheus in the Poems of Aemilia Lanyer,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 38 (1998): 87–108; and Susanne Woods, “Vocation and Authority: Born to Write,” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 84. 20. Lanyer portrays herself precisely as the humble “Innocent” throughout her text (see, e.g., ll. 313–28) and links herself with other virtuous women, like the poem’s nine dedicatees, to forge a community of “shared experiences of oppression and discrimination at the hands of men” (McGrath, “‘Let Us Have Our Libertie Againe,’ ” 336). With some similarities of effect, Schnell, “Aemilia Lanyer and the Aims of Feminist Criticism,” interprets “The Description of Cooke-ham” not as “an encomium to but an indictment of the myth of aristocratic generosity and fairness” (34). See also the modifications of conventional readings of female community in Lanyer’s work by McBride (“Remembering Orpheus,” 92–93) and Catherine Keohane, “ ‘That Blindest Weakenesse Be Not Over-Bold’: Aemilia Lanyer’s Radical Unfolding of the Passion,” ELH 64 (1997): 375–76. 21. Beilin, Redeeming Eve, 182. 22. Lynette McGrath, “Metaphoric Subversions: Feasts and Mirrors in Aemelia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” Literature, Interpretation, Theory 3 (1991): 103. 23. Wendy Wall, “Our Bodies/Our Texts?: Renaissance Women and the Trials of Authorship,” in Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, ed. Carol J. Singley and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney (Albany: New York State University Press, 1993), 60. 24. This course is made more attractive through manipulation of feminine aesthetics, e.g., appeasing reader repugnance by recoding the battered body of Christ as an object of beauty: “No Dove, no Swan, nor Iv’rie could compare / With this faire corps, when ’twas by death imbrac’d; / No rose, nor no vermillion halfe so faire / As was that pretious blood that interlac’d / His body” (“To the Ladie Katherine . . . ,” ll. 79–83). At other points Lanyer employs a variant of this strategy to locate a ground of common experience for all of her female readers. Cooking as a common domestic language (with even the most affluent ladies exercising some supervisory influence) is employed in coding Christian martyrdom to make the subject less forbidding or threatening. The “hony dropping dew of holy love” becomes a metaphorical sweetener that neutralizes the sourness of martyrdom: His sweetnesse sweet’ned all the sowre of death, To faithfull Stephen his appointed Saint; Who by the river stones did loose his breath, When paines nor terrors could not make him faint: So was this blessed Martyr turn’d to earth, To glorifie his soule by deaths attaint: This holy Saint was humbled and cast downe, To winne in heaven an everlasting crowne. (ll. 1745–52) Similarly, Christ’s “bruised body” becomes

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This wheate of Heaven the blessed Angells bread, Wherewith he feedes his deere adopted Heires; Sweete foode of life that doth revive the dead, And from the living takes away all cares; To taste this sweet Saint Laurence did not dread, The broyling gridyrone cool’d with holy teares: Yeelding his naked body to the fire, To taste this sweetnesse, such was his desire. (ll. 1785–92) On Lanyer’s use of the metaphor of the feast throughout the poem, see McGrath, “Metaphoric Subversions,” 104–7. 25. To counter the example of men who mistreat or defame women and are thereby connected to “they that dishonoured Christ his Apostles and Prophets, putting them to shamefull deaths” (“To the Vertuous Reader” 48–49), Lanyer cites the altruistic sacrifices of Peter and of John the Baptist (ll. 1809–24): The Princes of th’Apostles were so filled With the delicious sweetnes of his grace, That willingly they yeelded to be killed, Receiving deaths that were most vile and base, For his name sake, that all might be fulfilled. They with great joy all torments did imbrace: The ugli’st face that Death could ever yeeld, Could never feare these Champions from the field. (ll. 1801–8) See also Berry’s comments on Christ as a “woman’s deity” (“Digression as Style,” 213). 26. Woods, “Women at the Margins,” 113. 27. Lanyer manipulates conventions of popular romance and love poetry to enhance her text’s appeal to a female readership. The body of Christ is presented “(deare Lady) to your view, / Upon the Crosse depriv’d of life or breath, / To judge if ever Lover were so true, / To yeeld himselfe unto such shamefull death” (ll. 1265– 68; cf. “To the Ladie Lucie . . . ,” ll. 15–16). To capitalize on the conceit of Christ-asLover, she contrasts the legendary love of Cleopatra for Antony with the Countess of Cumberland’s love of Christ (ll. 1409–48). Cleopatra’s love is great, “Yet thou a blacke Egyptian do’st appeare; / Thou false, shee true; and to her Love more deere” (ll. 1431–32). Rather than attempting to rewrite popular approval of Cleopatra’s suicide (see Ng [438–39]), Lanyer exploits it to the greater flattery of the Countess: “Her virtuous life exceeds thy worthy death” (l. 1441). The poet even introduces a blazon of Christ; while it is ultimately derived from descriptions in the Song of Solomon, its detailing accords with the conventions of female blazons in popular love poetry (ll. 1305–20). A complementary (in terms of popular appeal) condemnation of male attraction to women being based solely on physical beauty warns that “greatest perills do attend the faire, / When men do seeke, attempt, plot and devise, / How they may overthrow the chastest Dame, / Whose Beautie is the White whereat they aime” (ll. 205–8).

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This leads to examples of archetypal beauties ruined by men, including Henry II’s mistress, Rosamund, popularized two decades earlier by Samuel Daniel, who would have been much happier if only she hadn’t been so attractive: Faire Rosamund, the wonder of her time, Had bin much fairer, had shee not bin faire; Beautie betraid her thoughts, aloft to clime, To build strong castles in uncertaine aire, Where th’infection of a wanton crime Did worke her fall; first poyson, then despaire, With double death did kill her perjur’d soule, When heavenly Justice did her sinne controule. (ll. 225–32) On manipulation of blazon tradition in the poem, see Ng, “Ameilia Lanyer and the Politics of Praise,” 441–42; and Woods, “Vocation and Authority,” 92. 28. Barbara Lewalski, “Re-writing Patriarchy and Patronage,” 106. 29. Richard Caldwell, The Origin of the Gods: A Psychoanalytic Study of Greek Theogonic Myth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 159–61. 30. Riane Eisler, The Chalice & the Blade: Our History, Our Future (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 81–85.

5. “Violence and falsehood rules”: Subverting Masculine Romance in Lady Mary Wroth 1. It is merely apparent (the work’s first illusion of violence, a motif discussed in detail below), as Limena’s mother can only provide circumstantial evidence that Philargus has murdered her daughter: “‘Her husband,’ said she, ‘led her forth, where in a Wood, thicke enough to shade all light of pitie from him, hee killed her, and then burnt her, her clothes found in the Wood besmeard with blood, and hard by them the remnant of a great fire’” (The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts [Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995], 17). On Philargus’s motivations and Limena’s response to them, see Josephine Roberts, “‘The Knott Never to Bee Untide’: The Controversy Regarding Marriage in Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 110–12. Wroth’s prose fiction in this chapter will be cited from the Josephine A. Roberts edition of The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, and from The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts, completed by Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller (Tempe, Ariz.: Renaissance English Text Society, 1999). A “2:” will be included parenthetically to signify passages from the second portion of the Urania, unpublished during Wroth’s lifetime. Her verse and letters will be cited from The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), and citations will include its “1983”

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date to distinguish them from references to Part One of the Urania. Citations of her comedy, Love’s Victory (in Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents, ed. S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies [New York: Routledge, 1996]; not to be confused with William Chamberlaine’s 1658 play of the same title), also unpublished during her lifetime, will include Act.Scene.Line references. 2. Gary Waller, “Mary Wroth and the Sidney Family Romance: Gender Construction in Early Modern England,” in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 39. 3. Josephine Roberts has documented specific parallels between the sonnets of Mary Wroth and those of her father, Robert Sidney, and of her uncle, Sir Philip Sidney, in her edition of Wroth’s poetry (see, e.g., 1983: 93, 115–16, 121–23). Margaret P. Hannay, “‘Your vertuous and learned Aunt’: The Countess of Pembroke as Mentor to Mary Wroth,” in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: Tennessee University Press, 1991), has observed that “Since Wroth’s Urania is named for a character in the Arcadia, she may have thought of her work as—in some sense—continuing Sir Philip’s unfinished romance, even as her aunt was completing the Psalmes” (24; cf. Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle [Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1990], 21). Roberts also notes that young Mary accompanied her mother on “frequent trips to the Continent” (1983: 8) once her father was named governor of Flushing in 1588, and hence had some exposure to the conflict in the Low Lands that caused the death of her famous uncle. It is not surprising that she should bring a quality of detail to her own fictional conflicts that suggests some sort of firsthand knowledge. Many of Wroth’s scenes of chivalric combat are reminiscent of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in terms of detail and verisimilitude (see, e.g., 77, 82, 100–101, 105–6, 120, 316–17, 587; note especially Amphilanthus’s defeat of Asdrusius, 567). A number of others, however, seem calculated to draw attention to the convention of martial violence as excessive and artificial—and male, according to Sydelia, whose evil brother Terichillus orders her beloved murdered before her eyes: “‘Then those men, who were disguised in that shape (and the fittest for so savage an act) murdered him, making mee behold the cruelty for the greater torture’” (281–82). Rosindy, for example, is placed as the centerpiece in a tableau mordant, “fighting as hee had made walles of dead men of his owne killing, round about him, as if they had been cast up of purpose for his safetie” (156), while Philarchos constructs a gory highway: “A path he made of men, and paved the ground with bodyes, while their bloods sought how to bath them cleane, and wash their wounds: which given on so ill grounds, did blush for shame” (209). This same Philarchos transforms one defeated enemy into a virtual fountain “with a blow on the head, the blood springing out of his eyes, nose, and eares in greatest aboundance,” literally drowning him in his own blood because he had “no time nor meanes, to pull off his helme” (206). To amplify the incompatability of the romance genre’s confluence of love and war, Wroth occasionally cross-codes martial with amorous imagery, as when a group of knights “fought till the bloud ran as fast from their wounds, as dropps from a lovers eyes, comming from as heart-bleeding a cause” (203).

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4. On the Urania as autobiographical self-dramatization and as a staging of other contemporary figures including Denny, see Heather L. Weidemann, “Theatricality and Female Identity in Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 191–209. The Secound Part of the Countesse of Montgomery’s Urania makes numerous dramatic references, as when Rosindy condemns a woman’s “strained pratling ore stage-like-acting taulke” (2: 35), or in Wroth’s allusions to memorizing lines (2: 105), to the requisite setting for tragic scenes (2: 107), and to boy players (2: 160). As such, I have to take issue with Jeff Masten’s isolation of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus from the context of the Urania in order to assess it as a “vehemently anti-theatrical” text (“‘Shall I turne blabb?’: Circulation, Gender, and Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Sonnets,” in Early Women Writers: 1600–1720, ed. Anita Pacheco [New York: Longman, 1998], 40). 5. The pirate Sandringall, who comes to his profession through the urging of his wife, is convinced by her to burn the princess Antissia’s ship (an unforgiveably treacherous crime since it involves one woman victimizing another) to destroy evidence that they have ransacked it. When the time comes for her to jump into their escape ship, however, “she leaped, but short, her sin so heavy drowning her” (30). The wicked queen of Albania arranges to have her elderly husband murdered; subsequently inviting the hired murderers “to a private banquet, she poison’d them, reserving the favourite for some other vertuous purpose” (72). When she ignores the surviving killer (who, after being used for the “other vertuous purpose” to which Wroth sardonically alludes, falls in love with the queen) in her obsessive pursuit of a gentleman from Morea, the confederate becomes jealous and confesses his part in the king’s death: “hee was condemned to die, the manner by foure wilde horses” and the queen “was likewise condemned (for being a subject, shee was under the law), and so had her head struck off” (74). A similar case is that of the wicked mistress of the castle who stabs Amphilanthus “(who was then looking from herward, carelesse of her) under his Armour, giving him such a wound, as the bloud fell in great abundance from him: but soone was that well revenged” for “she was terribly tortured, and yet kept long in paine for her more lasting punishment, and lastly burn’d” (131). Even a more innocent injury, like the love complications Cupid and Venus enact through Silvestra (whom Venus calls “my instrument ordained / To kill, and save her friends” [5.7.71–72]) in Love’s Victory, initially threatens death to the female perpetrator, as priests sentence her to death by fire before Venus intervenes to save her. 6. Waller, “Mary Wroth and the Sidney Family Romance,” 57. 7. Though this also endangers them, as in the example of the warrior women who harry their male opponents with arrows, eventually compelling the men either to stop them through force (breaking the chivalric code) or to be killed by them (131). Wroth similarly displays the prowess of the giantess first wife of Lansaritano the Audacious, who almost bests him in battle when she becomes enraged by his domestic transgressions: “she, fierce and discontented with her husbands manner ore, rather, change of lyfe (having left her, and adoring an other too pallpably for his creditt and her best deservings from him), having an invincible spiritt, told him in

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noe loving ore courting way of itt, butt in a most curst and dispitefull sort wher, after som debate, they fell to blowes. And she, beeing as stout and fiercely stronge for her sex as hee was for his, was allmost hard enough for him.” After serving up this bit of vicarious parity for the female reader (and, I suspect, writer), Wroth deromanticizes the violence by suggesting that Lansaritano, “fearing” defeat, draws close in apparent reconciliation, “And insteed of a kinde imbrace, with his foote and knee bruised her side and belly soe, as she immeadiately died” (2: 188). 8. Paul Salzman,”The Strang[e] Constructions of Mary Wroth’s Urania: Arcadian Romance and the Public Realm,” in English Renaissance Prose: History, Language, and Politics, ed. Neil Rhodes (Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997), 121. 9. Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle, 142–43; cf. 17. 10. Waller, “Mary Wroth and the Sidney Family Romance,” 54. 11. Consider the introduction of brothers Steriamus and Selarinus, whose long, curly hair “so pretily plaid, as the Sunne-beames in the water” and whose goat-skin clothes leave much of “their skinne most bare, as armes and leggs, and one shoulder, with part of their thighes; but so white was their skinne, as seem’d the Sunne in love with it, would not hurt, nor the bushes so much as scratch” (19–20). Once beautiful Urania appears, “they stept back in wonder to see that beautie, which yet in the masculine they came neere to” (20). When Clavarindo takes off his helmet, “hee seemed a Venus in Marses habitt” (2:67), and indeed is nearly raped by a halfwoman, half-Griffin monster who “came towards mee, wagling her head like a light wanton, licking her lips for treacherous kisses” and “fell foule upon mee, by force seeking what by craft she cowld nott doe.” Wroth allows her readers the vicarious pursuit of Clavarindo, but keeps him chaste to protect their identification with his values; he apologizes that “I grew soe uncivill to the face of woemankinde (though to that sex I ame a faithfull servant) as I strake her over the head, cleaving itt in tow” (2: 69). 12. Breasts figure prominently as overdetermined signifiers in the examples here since they communicate both vulnerability and eroticism, but they are certainly not the only female anatomy on display in the two parts of the Urania—cf. “the smalls of her legs” which Antissius says “are not very small” since “My Auntie is well underlayd” (2: 54). 13. Helen Hackett, “The Torture of Limena: Sex and Violence in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen, and Suzanne Trill (Keele, Staffordshire: Keele University Press, 1996), 98. 14. Rosindy’s disguise and reference here recalls Herodotus’ King Candaules (and 401, line 22, refers to Cautulus as “Caudalus,” a likely printer’s error for “Candalus”), who in Book One of The Histories is murdered when he mistakes the nature of his power over his wife. The parallel may recall Rosindy’s struggles with Clotorindus over Meriana (155–57). 15. Wroth encodes a positive association with the male gaze for Forester, who explains of his beloved, Silvestra, “my thoughts did ascend / No higher than to look,” despite Lissius’s taunt that “this of all is strangest: to affect / Only the sight and not the joys respect” (1.2.224–25,228–29). Silvestra voices her skepticism that Forester’s

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motives can be pure, insisting that “seeing” provokes desire (2.1.45–49). Near the end of the play, his reward for this chaste gaze is to be sent a dream vision of Silvestra burning at the stake (5.6.5–10), giving him the opportunity to demonstrate his faithfulness by attempting her rescue. 16. This same temptation is expressed as Pamphilia’s willing undoing in her sonnets written to Amphilanthus: Why should wee nott loves purblind charmes resist? Must wee bee servile, doing what hee list? Noe, seeke some hoste to harbour thee: I fly Thy babish trickes, and freedome doe profess; Butt O my hurt, makes my lost hart confess I love, and must: So farwell liberty. (1983: 95) On the degree to which this also mirrors the female romance reader’s experience, see Helen Hackett, “‘Yet Tell Me Some Such Fiction’: Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and the ‘Femininity’ of Romance,” in Early Women Writers: 1600–1720, ed. Anita Pacheco (New York: Longman, 1998), 59–63. 17. Ann Rosalind Jones, “Designing Women: The Self as Spectacle in Mary Wroth and Veronica Franco,” in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 148. 18. For the genre-challenging metaphorical violence in Wroth’s comic drama, see especially 2.1.229–33 and 3.2.9–14. One of the most striking examples of the “bleeding heart” metaphor approaching the literal—superceding Amphilanthus’s shield, which displays the image of a bleeding heart when he appears as the Knight of Love—occurs in the second part of the Urania when Claramundo, whose father was murdered, dresses himself and his army all in black, “butt in his Coronett hee caried a bleeding hart and drops of blood made soe artificially as shewed as if bleeding, and the drops soe furiously exprest as if criing for revenge” (2: 241). 19. Perhaps the most well-known illustration of this in Wroth’s verse appears as the first sonnet in “A crowne of Sonetts dedicated to Love”: “In this strang labourinth how shall I turne?” (1983: 127), its sentiments echoed in the Cyprian Lady’s plea to Pamphilia regarding her love for Andromarko, “In this strange labourinth, help and aide poore afflicted mee, most excellent Princes” (2: 416), and in 4.1.66–68 of Love’s Victory: “Ah me, that doubt in me made me first run / Into this labyrinth of woe and care, / Which makes me thus to wed mine own despair.” On the labyrinth as stylistic design, and also for an overview of critical discussion concerning the labyrinth motif in Wroth, see Mary Moore, “The Labyrinth as Style in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 38 (1998): 109–25. The sonnet asserts that no matter which path the female lover takes out of love’s labyrinth, she is certain to encounter additional anxieties. While suggesting this as a significant qualitative difference in the experiences of the male and female lover, Wroth also resorts to simple reversals of male conventions to reinforce her depiction of female suffering, creating a beau monsieur sans merci: the male beloved as murderer (“An easy thing itt

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is to shed the blood / Of one, who att your will, yeelds to the grave” [1983: 94; cf. 102, 117]; “Why alas were you framd if alone to kill? / You knowe murdering / A crime by all condemn’d, is this your skill, / Nor caus’d nor furdering?” [1983: 196]). 20. Wroth at times employs the topical allusions to physical science that traditionally have been considered one of the genre characteristics of the so-called metaphysical poets. When hate is precipitated, for example, it is like the site of a fire, “where Oyle, pitch, rosin, flax, and all such cumbustable matters are together,” and “can be quenched with nothing till the ruine shewes the tryumph” (472). She displays knowledge of rudimentary anatomy (“like a body furnished by the perfectnes of a sound Liver with blood, and so life” [508]), and appropriates the authority of the physician to amplify the intensity of the effects of love’s traumas: “A surgeon I would aske, but ‘tis too late, / To stay the bleeding wound of my hurt heart: / The roote is toucht, and the last drops depart / As weeping for succeeding others fate” (1983: 176). Cf. her “desection” poem (1983: 161–62). 21. Wroth’s perspective on the hunting metaphor also ensures that the trophies taken in the Urania are male (and, not surprisingly, focus primarily on the site of the male gaze, the head): e.g., the head of the last of the treacherous Argoseans who had sought Morean genocide (2: 100); the giant’s head struck off by Amphilanthus and sent to Pamphilia (2: 202); the “body and head” of the usurping Sophy of Persia, “to bee kept till Pamphilia’s minde were knowne what showld bee dunn with itt” (2: 267); and, with Faire Designe exacting revenge from the giant who had captured Queen Melasinda, “the Insolent beasts armes, legs, and head fell to adorne his first trophies with his own sacrifies” (2: 302). 22. See, for example, Drusio’s explanation to Isabella/Lusio (2: 293) and the Cyprian Lady’s account of her love for Andromarko (2: 410). 23. Josephine Roberts, “Deciphering Women’s Pastoral: Coded Language in Wroth’s Love’s Victory,” in Representing Women in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University Press of Missouri, 1997), 168. 24. Fredson Thayer Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy 1587–1642 (1940; reprint, Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1959), 73. Citations of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (in English Drama: 1580–1642, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke and Nathaniel Burton Paradise [Boston: D.C. Heath and Co., 1933]) in the following discussion will include Act.Scene.Line references in parentheses. 25. Cf. the masculine example of Coriolanus’s literal wounds and the communication Shakespeare extrapolates from them: “I have some wounds upon me, and they smart / To hear themselves rememb’red” (1.9.28–29; in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al., 2nd edition [New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997], 1452). 26. Reflecting her conversance in male love poetry, however, Wroth also occasionally employs the fairly conventional recourse of the rejected lover to suicide if the beloved refuses to return a proferred love (see, e.g., 1983: 88, 116), recalling Robert Sidney’s Sonnet 33: “Wth how wide iawes would I my poison drinck / and swallowing her hate, my last scores pay / if once for all the venumnd cup would slay / and not that floting keep, that striues to sinck” (The Poems of Robert Sidney: Edited from the Poet’s Autograph Notebook, ed. P. J. Croft [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984], 260).

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27. Wroth allows Musella and Philisses to plot mutual suicide as evidence of the degree of their love (5.1.89–90, 105–108; 5.4.19ff) and to escape an arranged marriage of the Capulet variety. She also uses Shakespeare’s device of mistaking sedative for poison as a comic device, to demonstrate fidelity without requiring death as its price. 28. One of Wroth’s methods of doing so is to fashion conceits around images of violence unique to the experience of women. False hope in love is equated with the pregnancy that ends in miscarriage, “which feeds butt to destroy, and spill / What itt first breeds; unnaturall to the birth / Of thine owne wombe; conceaving butt to kill, / And plenty gives to make the greater dearth” (1983: 107). The conceit becomes increasingly more cruel as false hope in love is likened to the tyrant who appears to reward and advance certain individuals who are secretly targeted for death: “shadow they theyr wicked vile intent” until “Hope kills the hart, and tirants shed the blood” (1983: 107). The inconstancy of the beloved is similarly portrayed when Antissia loses Amphilanthus to Pamphilia, and she attempts to force him to examine his decision by portraying his rejection of her as a metaphorical abortion: “Have I offended? t’was att your desire / When by your vowes, you felt lov’s fire; / What I did erre in, was to please your will, / Can you gett, and the ofspring kill?” (1983: 163). 29. To represent the difficulty in resisting such male readings, however, particularly when the female interpreter is simply outnumbered (or coerced into action by existing conditions or expectations), Wroth provides counterexamples like that of Orilena, whose response is reminiscent of similarly masculinized decrees from Queen Elizabeth. A bloody battle is finally concluded with the death of Tolimargus, “who held among his men, as farre from blowes as he could, till (they were all kild) hee was forst to conclude the combat himselfe with the losse of his head, which Philarchos cut off, and presented to Orilena, who commanded it to be set upon the top of the Pillar, and all the other bodies laid about it, as the trophies of that victorie” (207). Cf. the aggression in figurative violence of the sort characterizing Love’s Victory, as when Musella tells chauvinist Lissius, “I hope to live to see you wail and weep, / And deem your grief far sweeter than your sleep” (2.1.73–74). 30. In her chapter “Woman’s Place in Man’s Life Cycle,” for example, Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), synthesizes Nancy Chodorow’s research on gender identity formation—which concludes that “separation and individuation” are essential to male gender identity “since separation from the mother is essential for the development of masculinity” while “femininity is defined through attachment” (8)—with Carol Lever’s examination of models of play among children (revealing that boys “learn both the independence and the organizational skills necessary for coordinating the activities of large and diverse groups of people” while girls’ play “replicates the social pattern of primary human relationships in that its organization is more cooperative” [10–11]) toward her own conclusion that the “elusive mystery of women’s development lies in its recognition of the continuing importance of attachment” and of women’s attempts “to protect this recognition while the developmental litany intones the celebration of separation, autonomy, individuation, and natural rights” (23). 31. In contrast, note the approval given male characters who become explicitly feminized by cross-dressing. Clavarindo is convinced by Clianté to dress in specially

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tailored drag to fool a giant, and “hee apareled in them, ther was nott soe pure a beauty to bee seene, nor any that cowld neere compare with her for curiositie of beauties owne parfection” (2: 71; cf. 2: 95); the effect transfixes the giant while Licandro goes after him with a poll ax: “letting him have noe more time then to cry out, ‘O lett mee heere this devine Creature speake,’ hee cleft his head in twane” (2: 72). General Lupus, leader of the forces oppressing the King of Argos, is killed by a disguised Nummurandro—the brainchild of besieged lady Mirilania, who “appointed that hee showld bee attired like a Country lass, for exceeding faire hee was, and nott more faire then lovely” (2: 87). Reiterating the point raised earlier in this chapter, in both of these examples a “good” man is empowered by voluntarily becoming feminized, and in so doing is able to defeat a “bad” man who has included the oppression of women as part of his evil design. 32. Cf. the fake head Terenius constructs “as none at first could thinke it was other then” Infortunius/Selarinus: “fleshly, pale, death-like was the complexion, the eyes settled, the mouth a little opener then usually, the haire of the same colour, but so much wanting the cleare brightnesse, as a dead mans haire will want of a living mans, the bloud as trickling downe out of the vaines, some spinning, and so naturally was all done to the life, as cunning could not performe more” (313). Wroth seems to imply that if the violence of death can prove illusory then many other constructs (including the myth of female inferiority) may well be exposed to be ultimately as artificial and insubstantial upon inspection. 33. Roberts, “ ‘The Knott Never to Bee Untied,’” 123. 34. To deflect recognition of her romance structure as a subversive vehicle, Wroth incorporates disclaimers into the text, as when she has Lamprino give a beloved several “small romancies” since “she did delight in thos harmles pretty expressions of witt” (2: 210), or when in her narrator voice she says of a distasteful old lord, “for learning, ore reading above a Romancie, hee never troubled him self withall” (2: 213). 35. Nona Feinberg, “Mary Wroth and the Invention of Female Poetic Subjectivity,” in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 177. There certainly are, however, antiblazons, like the description of a woman also described as “ ‘the greatest libertine the world had of female flesh’” (2: 159): “ ‘sufficiently craggy, bony, sunck in the cheekes, and eyes soe hollow as if they ment to goe a reverse and see how her frantick plotts sute with her braines; wide-mouthed, ill-toothed, which promiseth noe perfumed breath if nott by art; leane, and therfor dreadfull, for she hath too freely parted with her flesh, painted abominably as to stopping up of the furrowes time and ill living hath plowed her face with’” (2: 160).

6. “Tears woundes & blood”: Lady Anne Southwell’s Caustic Meditation on Domestic Survival 1. This chapter draws on Jean Klene’s transcribed edition (The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book: Folger MS.V.b.198, ed. Jean Klene [Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997]) of Folger MS. V.b.198 and British Library Lans-

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downe MS. 740 (this latter not being part of the wedding folios; see Klene’s commentary, xlii-xliii), as the primary elements of her literary “works.” Unless otherwise indicated, citations are from this edition, and will include page references, followed by line references. To avoid confusion in this chapter, but also to identify the author by the name she selected as her literary identity, I will subsequently refer to Lady Anne Southwell as “Southwell,” and to her first husband as “Sir Thomas Southwell.” 2. Klene, The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, xxvii. 3. This lyric may be read as a playful teasing of a tardy correspondent (as it is subtitled, “supposeinge hir to be dead by hir longe silence”), or as the poet’s first inkling of Lady Ridgeway’s death (in 1627), and hence a possible aid in dating the poem, since the lyric following it is “An: Epitaph vppon Cassandra MackWilliams wife to Sr Thomas Ridgway Earle of London Derry. by ye Lady A: S,” which declares, “Now let my pen bee choakt wth gall. / since I haue writt Propheticall” (27; ll. 1–2). 4. Linda L. Dove, “Composing (to) a Man of Letters: Lady Anne Southwell’s Acrostic to Francis Quarles,” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 11 (1998): 16. 5. The commonplace book includes “A List of my Bookes” (and “my” here may be a reference specifically to Captain Sibthorpe), and entry number ninety-seven out of ninety-eight is “Saint Peters Plaint in quarto” (101; l. 103). 6. See John Lodge, The Peerage of Ireland: or, A Genealogical History of the Present Nobility of that Kingdom, rev. M. Archdall, 4 vols. (London: William Johnston, 1754), 4: 228; Klene notes that Sir Thomas Southwell’s death certificate makes mention only of Elizabeth (The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, xvi). 7. The Geneva Bible, 73v. 8. Here’s another image to ponder. After reading Edward Topsell’s The History of Four-Footed Beasts (1607), Southwell for her own “memorye sett downe some perticulers that I best affect” (103; l. 6). The most detailed description she provides is of the Lamia—perhaps because she identifies with the “beutifull woeman and daughter to Bellus”; Jupiter “stole her out of Lybia and brought her into Itelye where he got many Children of her,” but jealous Juno “vexed her with a restless estate.” Moreover, Juno’s anger “killd her Children” as soon as they were born. The parallels to her own marriage are clear, including the move from England to Ireland, projection of her own jealousy regarding her husband causing her “restless state,” and worry or guilt associated with her own frustrations or anxieties figuratively “killing” her children (or at least compromising her relationship with them). However, she seems to take comfort from the fact that in compensation for harms done to her by Juno, the Lamia is given “exemptile eyes that might be taken in and out at her owne pleasure,” as well as “power to transforme herselfe into what shap shee would, this may pass for a fable. and may beare a good morrall” (103; ll. 17–26). Southwell may be similarly “transforming” herself “at her owne pleasure” into “what shap shee would” with the folios (and the encouraging support of her that they signify) presented by Sibthorpe. 9. Jean Klene, “Recreating the Letters of Lady Anne Southwell,” in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1993), 247. 10. Klene, The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, xv.

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11. A more cynical explanation of her ability to deal with the network of emotions that fuel anger may be found in her familiarity with medical opiates, as suggested by her depiction of death as “Laudenum that layes in steep / all oure afflictions in the lapp of slee’p” (35; ll. 25–26). The relative popularity of sevententh-century opiate use may be reflected in Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici assertion that prayer to God “is the dormative I take to bedward, I need no other Laudanum than this to make me sleepe” (The Major Works, ed. C. A. Patrides [New York: Penguin Books, 1977], 157). 12. The Geneva Bible, 92v. 13. Seneca, Moral Essays, trans. John W. Basore, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 1: 7, 9. 14. The same point, that violence can purify as well as destroy, is made even more emphatically when Southwell employs a horrific medical image: The surgeon that doth cure soome deepe deseaze doth seare the flesh and scarrefy the bone his deepe insytions doe noe whitt displease or sharpe iniections makes the patient mone those corsives which vnto the wound is layde brings hope of health; so wee are not dismayde (90–91; ll. 193–98) 15. Bishop Joseph Hall, Bishop Joseph Hall and Protestant Meditation in SeventeenthCentury England, ed. Frank Livingstone Huntley (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1981), 76. The following four sentences by Bishop Hall would have had particular pertinence for Southwell: “Thou art loaded with household cares, perhaps public; I bid thee not cast them away. Even these have their season which thou canst not omit without impiety. I bid thee lay them down at thy closet door when thou attemptest this work. Let them in with thee, thou shalt find them troublesome companions, ever distracting thee from thy best errand” (76). 16. Despite this statement of her writing’s private function, the commonplace book provides evidence that Southwell remains almost publicly self-conscious about employing first-person point of view and revises to avoid it—particularly when God is the first-person narrator (e.g., 51, ll. 3, 100; 53, ll. 52, 54). There are also occasional shifts in voice (“My noble Neighbour I will doe my best / and wheare I faile, please you supplye the rest” [40; ll. 11–12]; “If you haue lost your fflowinge sweete humiddities / and in a dust disdaine theise quantities / Pass it to oure beloued Doctor Featlye / his tongue dropps honnye, and can doe it neatlye” [41; ll. 19–22]) that seem to reflect direct address of specific parties. 17. Southwell is quite modest about her breadth of knowledge, but she demonstrates an informed familiarity with occult literature (e.g., with references to the technical terminology of alchemy in “Sonnett. 5” [2; l. 1] and “A Letter to Doctor Adam Bpp of Limerick by the Lady A:S:” [22; ll. 61–3], and to Cornelius Agrippa [139; ll. 487–90]), with logic (e.g., varieties of syllogisms [83; l. 228]), with the sciences (e.g., demonstrating knowledge of astronomy [noting “retrograde” motion, 25; l. 25], of chemistry [42; ll. 11–12], and of health and medicine [86; ll. 50–54]), and with a variety of ancient philosophies (e.g., “Apothegmes” #14 [106; ll. 37–47]).

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18. For similar antiwar sentiments, see “Thou shalt not steale” (84–85; ll. 13–24). 19. Dove, “Composing (to) a Man of Letters,” 14. 20. John Scoggin, the Oxford-educated jester of King Edward IV, is the fictional center of the japes narratives published in various Scoggins Jests editions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (two of which appeared in 1613 and 1626, perhaps bringing them to mind for Southwell). The point is to trivialize the male perspective described here as one that values the spiritual lessons of the Bible no more than comic or heroic fantasies. 21. “Thief,” as a sign in “Thou shalt not steale,” for example, is continually recoded to communicate a wide range of male deception—e.g., the gamester as thief (88; ll. 119–24), huntsman as thief (88; ll. 125–32), miser as thief (88–89; ll. 133–38), etc., with the semantic link being that any such “thievery” (rather than “maleness”) is self-crippling (89; ll. 157–62). 22. Indeed, she offers a parallel “map” of salvation for men (66–9; ll. 225–320) that charts a sort of liberal arts curriculum of the soul for the individual who chooses to “bee gods souldyer” (67; l. 225). 23. On the male side of the pox issue, consider the potential for a hair loss double entendre in “Nature, Mistris of affection”: “Eue to Adam, was his Crowne / and can baldness, be renowne / this thou pullst thy owne state downe / O meere maddness” (17; ll. 17–20). 24. See Klene’s discussion of this likelihood, The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, xvi–xvii. 25. In Sir Thomas Overbury, A Wife Now the Widdow of Sir Thomas Overbvrye. Being A most exquisite and singular Poem of the choice of a Wife. Wherevnto are added many witty Characters and conceited Newes, written by himselfe and other learned Gentlemen his friends. (London: Printed for Lawrence Lisle, 1614), C3. All subsequent references to Overbury’s works, to the writings of his friends, and to Southwell’s responses to them, will be to this volume. 26. In a similar example of identifying the norm and acknowledging its power in order subsequently to make way for challenge of it, Southwell seems to echo patriariachal tradition’s denigration of “Our lazy grandome Eve” as the scapegoat for original sin (77; ll. 25–30) in “Thou shalt not commit Adooltery.” However, two competing impulses are at work here. One is the extent to which the poet—perhaps in an early modern example of co-dependence—blames her own self-serving motives for marrying Sir Thomas as the rationale for his infidelities (79; ll. 91–120), and hence feels pressured to concede that this reflects some inherent feminine weakness. At the same time, it also serves as a ploy for tracing shortcomings to a male source (e.g., “Adam is the slaue to evill / and she commanded to obey his will” 77; ll. 37–38) as preface to another defense of women (77; ll. 39–48). 27. The Geneva Bible, 3. 28. And the poet is quick to complement this discrediting of the male with biblical examples of resourceful, virtuous women (see, e.g., 72; ll. 413–18, or 156–57; ll. 463–68, which juxtaposes the biblical heroism of Deborah with her recent historical incarnation in Elizabeth I, “that admired virgin Queene” who successfully resisted “Romes proud bulles,” a clever male-tweaking double entendre). 29. In his “An Epitaph composed to the Eternall memory of the Vertuous & well

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qualifyed Lady the Lady Anne Southwell deceased the second of October 1636,” he belittles his own poetic voice (“I found invention of soe low a flight / Her worth was still aboue my fancyees height” [115; ll. 62–63]), and after likening her to positive female archetypes from the Muses to the Graces, concludes, “Thou mayest giue more but she deseruees noe lesse” (115; l. 71). 30. See Klene’s discussion, The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, xxviii–xxxi. 31. Note that while the initials, “A.S.,” were dropped from Southwell’s “Answer to the Court newes” in the 1616 edition (and that the new appearance in that edition of elegies and epitaphs written to commemorate Overbury’s death, while including most of the contributors from the previous edition, did not include a lyric from Southwell), they were retained on her “Answer to the very Country Newes” reply to Donne.

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Selected Bibliography

Early Modern Primary Sources Anger, Jane. Jane Anger, her Protection for Women. In Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640, edited by Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, 172–88. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Askew, Anne. The Examinations of Anne Askew. Edited by Elaine V. Beilin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Bale, John. The vocacyon of Johan Bale. Edited by Peter Happé and John N. King. Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1990. Burghope, Marie. “The Vision. Or A Poeticall View of Ashridge in the County of Bucks. The ancient Seat of the Right Honorable John Earle of Bridgewater. Together with the History & Characters Of the most Considerable Members of that Noble Family. Written by one of the Female Sex in the Year 1699.” In Subordination and Authorship in Early Modern England: The Case of Elizabeth Cavendish Egerton and Her “Loose Papers,” edited by Betty S. Travitsky, 247–68. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999. Cerasano, S. P., and Marion Wynnes-Davies, eds. Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents. New York: Routledge, 1996. Colville, Elizabeth, Lady Culross. Ane Godlie Dreame, compylit in Scottish meter be M.M. gentlevvoman in Culros, at the requeist of her freindes. Edinburgh: Robert Charteris, 1603. Dowriche, Anne. The French Historie. That is; A lamentable Discourse of three of the chiefe, and most famous bloodie broiles that haue happened in France for the Gospel of Iesus Christ. London: Thomas Orwin for Thomas Man, 1589. Dowriche, Hugh. The Iaylors Conuersion. Wherein is liuely represented, the true image of a Soule rightlye touched, and conuerted by the Spirit of God. The waightie circumstances of which supernaturall worke, for the sweete amplifications, and fit applications to the present time, are now set downe for the comfort of the strong, and confirmation of the weake. London: Iohn Windet, 1596. Elizabeth I. A Book of Devotions Composed by Her Majesty Elizabeth. Translated by Rev. Adam Fox. Foreword by Rev. Canon J. P. Hodges. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smithe, 1977. . Collected Works. Edited by Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. . Elizabethan England and Europe: Forty Unprinted Letters from Elizabeth I to Protestant Powers. Edited by E. I. Kouri. London: University of London Institute of Historical Research, 1982. . “The Glass of the Sinful Soul.” 1544. In Marc Shell, Elizabeth’s Glass. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. . Hercules Oetaeus. In Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents, edited by S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, 11–12. New York: Routledge, 1996.

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. Letters of Queen Elizabeth and King James VI of Scotland. Edited by John Bruce. Camden Society. 1849. Reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1968. . Letters of Queen Elizabeth. Edited by G. B. Harrison. London: Cassell and Co., Ltd., 1935. . The Poems of Queen Elizabeth I. Edited by Leicester Bradner. Providence: Brown University Press, 1964. . The Public Speaking of Queen Elizabeth: Selections from Her Official Addresses. Edited by George P. Rice, Jr. 1951. Reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1966. Foxe, John. The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe. 8 vols. Edited by Rev. Stephen Reed Cattley. London: R.B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1837–39. Gosynhill, Edward. The praise of all women, called Mulierum Paean. In Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640, edited by Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, 157–70. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Hughes, Paul L., and James F. Larkin, eds. Tudor Royal Proclamations. 3 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969. Lanyer, Aemilia. The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer. Edited by Susanne Woods. Women Writers in English 1350–1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Martin, Randall, ed. Women Writers in Renaissance England. New York: Longman, 1997. Overbury, Sir Thomas. A Wife Now the Widdow of Sir Thomas Overbvrye. Being A most exquisite and singular Poem of the choice of a Wife. Wherevnto are added many witty Characters and conceited Newes, written by himselfe and other learned Gentlemen his friends. London: Printed for Lawrence Lisle, 1614. Southwell, Lady Anne. The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book: Folger MS. V.b.198. Edited by Jean Klene. Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997. Tymme, Thomas, trans. The Three Partes of Commentaries, Containing the whole and perfect discourse of the Ciuill warres of Fraunce, vnder the raignes of Henry the second, Frances the second, and of Charles the ninth. With an Addition of the cruell Murther of the Admirall Chastilion, and diuers other Nobles, committed the 14. daye of August. Anno 1572. London: Frances Coldocke, 1574. Wroth, Lady Mary. The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. Edited by Josephine A. Roberts. Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995. . Love’s Victory. In Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents. Edited by S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, 97–126. New York: Routledge, 1996. . The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Edited by Josephine A. Roberts. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. . The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. Edited by Josephine A. Roberts, completed by Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller. Tempe, Ariz.: Renaissance English Text Society, 1999. Wynne-Davies, Marion, ed. Women Poets of the Renaissance. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Secondary Sources Altman, Joel B. “ ‘Vile Participation’: The Amplification of Violence in the Theater of Henry V.” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 1–32.

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Index

Acts and Monuments (Foxe), 44–45, 49–50, 58, 69, 144n. 28, 147n. 6 Ane Godlie Dreame (Colville), 13–14, 19 Anger, Jane, 130, 158n. 15 Anne of Denmark, 88–91, 98, 159n. 17 Aristotelian theory of tragedy, 73 Art of Divine Meditation, The, Hall, 127, 171n. 15 Arte of English Poesie (Puttenham), 52, 76–77, 147n. 8 Ascham, Roger, 48, 66 Askew, Anne: The Examinations of Anne Askew, 29–47, 121, 142nn. 7 and 8, 142–43n. 9, 143nn. 10 and 14, 145n. 34; identified with Christ, 37; rejecting transubstantiation, 31, 33–36, 39, 145n. 34; resisting use of rhetorical violence, 32–34, 36, 39–40, 46–47; strategy of selective affirmation, 32–34 Authority of writer, 15–16, 32–34, 47, 87–88, 92–94, 99, 111–12, 128–31, 156–57n. 8

Burghope, Marie: “The Vision,” 138–39n. 26

Babington Conspiracy, 65, 67, 151n. 40 Bale, John, 29–30, 34, 37–44, 141– 42n. 1, 143n. 19, 144nn. 28, 31 and 32, 144–45n. 33, 145nn. 34 and 36, 146n. 1 Blood, tropes of, 64–65, 78, 96, 166n. 18 Bonner, Bishop Edmund, 31, 36, 43, 142nn. 7 and 8 Boyle, Sir Richard, Earl of Cork, 122 Browne, Sir Thomas: Religio Medici, 171n. 11 Burgaeus, Annas, 70, 73, 77, 81–82, 85

Caius, Dr. John, 20 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley, 148– 49n. 19 Charles IX of France, 77–80, 85 Chettle, Henry: Hoffman, 109 Chivalric hero, feminized, 105–7, 163n. 3 Christ, Jesus: vulnerability as power, 89, 92–99 Cleobury the pretender, 60 Clifford, Anne, Countess of Dorset, 159n. 17 Clifford, Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, 157n. 11, 159n. 17, 161n. 27 Colville, Elizabeth, Lady Culross: Ane Godlie Dreame, 13–14, 19 Comparative Discourse of Bodies Natural & Politique, A, Forset, 21 Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 167n. 25 Counter, The, 38 Countesse of Montgomeries Urania, The, Wroth, 100, 102–18, 162–63n. 1, 164n. 5, 165nn. 11 and 14, 166– 67n. 19, 167n. 20 and 26, 168nn. 28 and 29, 169n. 32 Courtenay, Edward, Earl of Devonshire, 60 Cranmer, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, 48 Crashaw, Richard, 158n. 14 Cromwell, Thomas, Earl of Essex, 142n. 1

185

186

index

Dare, Christopher, 34, 37 de Coligny, Admiral Gaspard, 71–72, 74–75, 81, 84–85 De humani corporis fabrica (Vesalius), 20 de Medici, Catherine, 79, 83–84 Denny, Sir Edward, 101 De providentia (Seneca), 126 de Serres, Jean, 67, 69, 154–55n. 18 de Vere, John, Earl of Oxford, 142n. 1 Devereaux, Robert, Earl of Essex, 51 Donne, John, 117, 120, 135–36 Dowriche, Anne: asserting cyclic nature of violence, 75–78, 83–84, 154– 55n. 18, 155n. 26; feminist semiotic resists political violence, 68–72, 83–86, 153n. 8; The French Historie, 67–86, 124, 154–55n. 18; strategies to provoke reader response, 72–75, 154n. 13; use of dramatic structures and allusions, 78–80, 153–4n. 10 Dowriche, Hugh: The Iaylors Conuersion, 152–53n. 6 Duchess of Malfi, The, Webster, 18–19, 109 Duns Scotus, John, 145n. 37 Edgecumbe, Piers, 67–68 Elizabeth I, 48–67, 83–84, 146n. 1, 147n. 8, 150n. 28, 151nn. 35, 38 and 39, 151–52n. 40, 172n. 28; abhorrence of violence as empowerment, 54, 58, 64–65, 147–48n. 13; altruism/vulnerability of, as trope, 56–59, 62, 64, 83, 149n. 22 and 23, 150–51n. 32; exploiting prison experience, 50–51; potential for violence as rhetorical tool, 51–56, 148n. 18 Englishmans treasure, The (Vicary), 20 Eve: as cultural scapegoat, response to, 22, 89–90, 130, 133–34, 158n. 15, 172n. 26 Examinations of Anne Askew, The (Askew), 29–47, 121, 142nn. 7 and 8, 142–43n. 9, 143nn. 10 and 14, 145n. 34 Execution: illusion of, 115; as sacrifice and worship, 44–47, 70–71 Faerie Queene, The (Spenser), 43, 114, 116

Farrer, Robert, 58 Female body: as erotic signifier, power of, 103–7; as text, 22–23, 58–59, 140–41n. 40; in tropes of wounding and bleeding, 59–60, 64 Forman, Simon, 87 Forset, Edward: A Comparative Discourse of Bodies Natural & Politique, 21 Foxe, John: Acts and Monuments, 44–45, 49–50, 58, 69, 144n. 28, 147n. 6 Frederick V, 128 French Historie, The (A. Dowriche), 67–86, 124, 154–55n. 18 Gardiner, Stephen, Bishop of Winchester, 33 Gosynhill, Edward: The praise of all women, called Mulierum Paean, 87, 89 Grindal, William, 48, 66 Guise, Duke of, 69, 74, 79, 84 Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, 128 Hall, Bishop Joseph: The Art of Divine Meditation, 127, 171n. 15 Henry II of France, 77, 81–82, 85, 153n. 9 Henri III, 65 Henry VIII, 31, 35, 48, 58 Hepburn, James, Earl of Bothwell, 54, 62–63 History of Four-Footed Beasts, The (Topsell), 170n. 8 Hoffman (Chettle), 109 Hotman, François, 69 Howard, Frances, Countess of Somerset, 136 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, 51 Iaylors Conuersion, The (H. Dowriche), 152–53n. 6 James VI, 52–56, 59, 61–62, 147n. 11, 150n. 30, 151–52n. 40 Jonson, Ben, 89 Kyd, Thomas: The Spanish Tragedy, 71, 109–10 Lanyer, Aemilia: body of Christ as feminized text, 96–99, 160–61n. 24; female readers as women warriors,

index 94–95; recoding masculine virtues as feminine, 90–94; resisting male social hierarchy, 88–90, 161n. 25; Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, 87–99, 130, 156–57n. 8, 157n. 11, 158–59n. 16, 161–62n. 27 Latimer, Hugh, 38 “Lie, The” (Ralegh), 125 Lorraine, Cardinal of, 82 Love’s Victory (Wroth), 102–3, 108–10, 164n. 5, 165–66n. 15, 166nn. 18 and 19, 167–68n. 27, 168n. 29 Maitland, William, 61, 146n. 1 Marguerite of Navarre, 48, 50, 53 Marlowe, Christopher: The Massacre at Paris, 69, 153n. 8 Mary I, 49, 53, 63 Mary, Queen of Scots, 59, 61–66, 84, 146n. 1, 151n. 38, 151–52n. 40 Massacre at Paris, The (Marlowe), 69, 153n. 8 Melville, Elizabeth. See Colville, Elizabeth Middleton, Thomas: The Revenger’s Tragedy, 109 Munda, Constantia, 130 Newgate, 38–39, 41 Norris, Sir Henry, 62 Overbury, Sir Thomas, 120, 133, 135; A Wife Now the Widdow of Sir Thomas Overbvrye, 135–36 Parr, Queen Catherine, 35, 38, 56 Parsons, Robert: A Treatise of three Conversions of England, 35 Paulet, Sir Amyas, 65 Percy, Henry, Earl of Northumberland, 48 Perrot, Sir John, Lord Deputy of Ireland, 148n. 17 Perryn, Friar William, 43–44, 144– 45n. 33 Pilate, Pontius: as emblem of corrupt privilege, 89, 158–59n. 16 Plato: Symposium, 134 praise of all women, called Mulierum Paean, The (Gosynhill), 87, 89 Public entertainment, violence in, 21

187

Puttenham, George: Arte of English Poesie, 52, 76–77, 147n. 8 Quarles, Francis, 129 Radcliffe, Thomas, Earl of Sussex, 148n. 17 Ralegh, Sir Walter: “The Lie,” 125 Religio Medici (Browne), 171n. 11 Revenger’s Tragedy, The (Middleton), 109 Rhetorical violence: as amplification, 18, 29, 39, 44–45, 49, 72–75, 77, 86, 97, 102, 107–12, 114–15, 122–23, 129, 145n.34, 163n. 3; body politic and, 60–61, 64, 84, 140n. 37; defined, 16; experiential sources of, 17, 41, 45, 50, 73–74, 93–94, 107–12, 132; as feminist semiotic, 22–23, 68–72, 82, 86, 90–94, 112–13, 168–69n. 31; as personal empowerment, 15, 28, 65, 90–92, 98, 115; as persuasion, 15, 36, 43–44, 125–26, 169n. 32; psychological function of, 14, 74–75, 97, 107–8, 119, 124–26, 170n. 8; relation to pain, 16–17, 41, 45, 73–74, 93–94, 107–12, 132, 138n. 13; to resist victimization, 14, 63–64, 82–83, 110–11, 132; as response to patriarchy, 19, 68–72, 80–82, 94–96, 117–18, 130–31, 134–36, 158–59n. 16; as semantic control, 14, 16, 40, 58, 115, 123–27, 129–30; threatening actual violence, 51, 75–78, 93 Rich, Sir Richard, 37–39, 44 Russell, Francis Lord, Earl of Bedford, 55 Salve Deus Rex Judæorum (Lanyer), 87–99, 130, 156–57n. 8, 157n. 11, 158–59n. 16, 161–62n. 27 Satan: as icon of patriarchal values, 79–83, 135–36 Scoggin, John, 172n. 20 Secound Part of the Countesse of Montgomery’s Urania, The (Wroth), 103, 105–8, 114, 117, 164–5n. 7, 165n. 11 and 12, 166nn. 18 and 19, 167n. 21 and 22, 168–69n. 31, 169nn. 34 and 35 Semiotic objectives, 20, 34–35, 37, 58, 60, 62, 68–72, 76, 82, 93, 96, 103–7, 112, 114, 126–31

188

index

Seneca, Lucius Anneus: De providentia, 126 Senecan tragedy: reacting against, 109–10, 124 Seymour, Edward, 48 Shakespeare, William, 168n. 27; Coriolanus, 167n. 25; Titus Andronicus, 109 Sibthorpe, Captain Henry, 119, 134, 170n. 5, 172–73n. 29 Sidney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, 91, 94, 159n. 17 Sidney, Sir Philip, 91, 163n. 3 Sidney, Robert, 163n. 3, 167n. 26 Somerville, John, 67 Southwell, Lady Anne, 119–36, 170nn. 3 and 8, 171nn. 11, 14, and 17, 172nn. 21, 22, 23; condemnation of adultery, 131–32, 172n. 26; on domestic problems, 120–23; feminist philosophy of survival, 123–27; as feminist proponent, 132–36, 172n. 28; and self-conscious authorship, 127–31, 171n. 16 Southwell, Robert, 121 Southwell, Sir Thomas, 119–21, 131 Sowernam, Esther, 130 Spanish Tragedy, The (Kyd), 71, 109–10 Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queene, 43, 114, 116 Stuart, Henry, Lord Darnley, 62–63 Subjective construction, 14; through self-signification, 45–46, 87–88, 110–11, 127–31, 170n. 8; through semantic shaping, 30–33, 80, 88–89, 91–92, 95, 154n. 12 Symposium (Plato), 134 Throgmorton, Francis, 67 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 109 Topsell, Edward: The History of FourFooted Beasts, 170n. 8

Torture: of Anne Askew, 39–41, 45; of Catholic prisoners, 21, 148n. 17; of George Ker, 148n. 16; of messenger from Elizabeth I, 54 Treatise of three Conversions of England, A (Parsons), 35 Tymme, Thomas, 67, 69–70, 75, 78, 152–53n. 6, 154n. 16, 154–55n. 18, 155n. 23 Vesalius, Andreas: De humani corporis fabrica, 20 Vicary, Thomas: The Englishmans treasure, 20 “Vision, The” (Burghope), 138–39n. 26 Webster, John: The Duchess of Malfi, 18–19, 109 Wife Now the Widdow of Sir Thomas Overbvrye, A (Overbury), 135–36 Wounding: as trope of rhetorical violence, 36, 59–60, 64, 71, 86, 96, 99, 108, 110–11, 139–40n. 35, 153n. 9 Wriothesley, Sir Thomas, 37–40 Wroth, Lady Mary, 100–118, 167n. 20; The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania, 100, 102–18, 162–63n. 1, 164n. 5, 165n. 11 and 14; 166n. 16; 166– 67n. 19; 167n. 20 and 26, 168nn. 28 and 29, 169n. 32; erotic signifiers, rhetorical impact of, 104–7, 165n. 11; on female power and aggression, 101–3, 164n. 5, 164–65n. 7; gendering violence, 107–12, 167n. 21, 168nn. 28 and 29; Love’s Victory, 102–3, 108–10, 164n. 5, 165–66n. 15, 166nn. 18 and 19, 168nn. 27 and 29; The Secound Part of the Countesse of Montgomery’s Urania 103, 105–8, 114, 117, 164–65n. 7, 165n. 11 and 12, 166nn. 18 and 19, 167n. 21 and 22, 168–69n. 31, 169nn. 34 and 35; on women as readers of violence, 112–18