Women, Texts and Histories 1575-1760

Diane Purkiss, Clare Brant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9781138159365
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134938940
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The shared aim of these important new critical interventions into the early modern period is to make fresh feminist attempts to uncover the writings of Elizabethan and Jacobean women. Subject to silence, censorship and manipulation in the terms of overriding political concerns of the day, the feminist history of the early modern period is still a largely unwritten story. New feminist analysis can expose the conditions of production in which the history of the period was constructed: this revealing new Collection thereby exposes the untold stories which underpin the official texts. By beginning to explore this period from women's point of view, Women, Texts and Histories shows the crucial and fascinating ways in which women's writing may undermine many of the received assumptions on which the history of the period has depended.

1
WHY THE LADY’S EYES ARE NOTHING LIKE THE SUN

Lorna Hutson

Everybody who knows anything about Aemilia Lanyer, author of the first original poem by a woman to be published in the seventeenth century, knows that she had black eyes, black hair and a dark past. Her poems are only available to modern readers in complete form in A.L.Rowse’s edition which advertises them as The Poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady and prefaces them with pages of repetitive prose, the gist of which is to insist on reading the text, ‘rampant feminism’ and all, as the Dark Lady’s revenge:

It is obvious that something personal had aroused her anger. Shakespeare’s Sonnets had been published, though not by him, in 1609, with their unforgettable portrait of the woman who had driven him ‘frantic-mad’, dark and musical, tyrannical and temperamental, promiscuous and false,… The portrait was defamatory enough. The very next year, 1610, her book was announced and in 1611 published.¹

For all that he values the text as enabling us to ‘read the character of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady at last’, however, Rowse proves susceptible to the charms of Lanyer’s verse. The bits he likes best are, tellingly enough, reminiscent of Shakespeare. He quotes, for example, from Lanyer’s exhortation to Anne Clifford to internalize the knowledge of Christ disclosed in the text of her poem: ‘Yet lodge him in the closet of your heart,/Whose worth is more than can be shew’d by Art.’² In these lines, Rowse contends, we hear the unmistakable accents, and recall the Sonnets, where the Bard writes of locking the image of his beloved in his chest.³ I mention this not so much to argue with the implication of Shakespeare’s influence, as to instance the extent to which our understanding of the discursive medium in which sixteenth-and seventeenth-century writers worked is filtered through our familiarity with Shakespeare’s deployment of its most fundamental metaphors. It will be one purpose of this chapter to suggest that this sense of familiarity obscures from us the implication of these very metaphors in the humanist project of relocating masculine virtue and honour in the power to authorize meaning. Read in this context, Lanyer’s attempt to produce, from a medium so heavily invested in the articulation of masculine virtue, a poem which celebrates woman as an effective reader and agent, rather than offering her as a dark secret to be disclosed, becomes the subject of Salve Deus, Rex Judeorum.

First, however, to grapple with the issue of Lanyer’s credibility as a poet. Refutations of Rowse’s theory mostly turn on the paucity of evidence for positing Lanyer as Shakespeare’s mistress; no-one denies that she was promiscuous, but as Samuel Schoenbaum has reminded us, there were no end of promiscuous women about in Elizabethan London. Besides, Schoenbaum argued, we must remember that the Sonnets are not an autobiography but a system of moral and poetic meaning: ‘the opposition between Fair Youth and Dark Lady’ needs no reference to a particular woman to explicate it, he concluded, for it is, ‘perfectly comprehensible in terms of moral and poetic symbolism’.⁴

Now, a ‘moral and poetic symbolism’ that is ‘perfectly comprehensible’ is one which is still working, still creating an evaluative language in which to articulate experience and authorize desire. Yet why should the antithesis between Fair Youth and Dark Lady recommend itself thus as a ‘natural’symbolism? Critics of the Sonnets make us ashamed to ask such a naïve question. They either read the moral evaluation of the antithesis as referring to the conduct of particular individuals known to Shakespeare, or exploit its signifying potential to consider larger issues, such as the possibility of integrity in poetic representation. This latter position is represented by John Kerrigan’s sophisticated introduction to the Penguin edition of the Sonnets. For Kerrigan, the Sonnets are largely concerned with the unattainable goal of a poetic reproduction that would remain faithful to its object. This involves the apparent rejection of metaphor and comparison, principal devices of sonnet rhetoric. ‘Shakespeare’, he claims, intriguingly, ‘exposes the competitive roots of similitude.’⁵ He goes on to explain that similitude is an inherently competitive figure of speech because, in making a topic known to us by analogy with things conceded to be of value (as hair is likened to gold or lips to rubies) similitude implies that value itself is merely a discursive effect, a ‘painted beauty’. What is more, similitude transforms its topic into the site of an implied rivalry between author and reader over the concession of value and credibility. Shakespeare, concludes Kerrigan, refuses to embroil his beloved in this invidious marketplace of ingenuity, and aims at a text that is stripped of metaphor. However, one point which this attractive thesis overlooks should help us to understand why, in spite of Schoenbaum’s easy dismissal of Rowse’s identification of Lanyer as the ‘original’ Dark Lady, there can be no such easy dismissal of the implications of the ‘Dark Lady’symbolism for our reading of Lanyer’s text. The point is this: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, as Kerrigan has argued, achieve their effect of sincerity by discrediting the operations of similitude. But they do so by figuring their own negotiation of value through similitude as the ‘dark’ or ‘black’ space of the sonnet mistress, whose value is always conferred, never intrinsic. If we accept this as a symbolism of value, then we are telling the old story of truth’s betrayal by metaphor in the form of another old story: the betrayal of a masculine ‘marriage of true minds’ by the bodily female. This is the story towards which Kerrigan’s criticism tends, with its suggestion that Shakespeare’s text can reproduce the ‘truth’ of its relation to a masculine subject. Of sonnet 105, where Shakespeare rejects comparison (‘leaves out difference’ ) for identity, with the repetition of the refrain ‘Fair, kind and true’, Kerrigan writes, ‘The text is stripped of metaphor, there are no false comparisons…. The friend is coextensive with the text; he really is “all” its “argument”.’⁶ This ignores a sly subtext of sexual difference; if the usual female friend were to be praised for being ‘kind’, then she would certainly need a lot of false painting if she were to continue ‘fair’, let alone ‘true’. So the scrupulous rejection of comparison that Kerrigan reads as a quest for integrity is actually an exposition of the extent to which the evaluative power of comparison depends on the mobilization and concealment of a single hierarchical opposition—in this case, that of gender.

The association of the impure motives of a comparative rhetoric, a rhetoric of praise, with the inherent ‘falsehood’ of woman is so germane to our making sense of Renaissance texts that we should not be surprised to find it informing critical assessment of a real woman poet of the Renaissance. Thus we find that when woman scholars cease to celebrate Lanyer simply for managing to be a woman and a poet all at once, their comments on her text display a tendency to account for its embarrassing length, inappropriateness and apparent sycophancy by referring to the lady’s notorious past. Thus, Muriel Bradbrook sums Lanyer up scathingly:

To choose the subject of the Crucifixion and then surround it with several times its own bulk in carefully graded verses of adulation to various ladies, beginning with the Queen— and even interrupting the sacred narrative to bob a curtsey to the Countess of Cumberland, one of the richest women in England, seems to me very practical politics for an ex-mistress of the Lord Hunsden… I doubt if ‘feminism’ or the defence of women was disinterested here.⁷

Barbara Lewalski, by contrast, is persuaded of the sincerity of Lanyer’s feminism, but has doubts about her religious conviction:

Given Lanyer’s questionable past, her evident concern to find patronage, and her continuing focus on women, contemporary and biblical, we might be tempted to suppose that the ostensible religious subject of the title poem, Christ’s Passion, simply provides a thin veneer for a subversive feminist statement.⁸

The assumption is that a ‘true’ poem should not be making use of patronage relations, or of a rhetoric of praise; to do so is to betray a dark want of ‘disinterestedness’ which is in turn associated with a want of moral integrity, or chastity. Actually, Renaissance literary theory assumes the opposite: poetic discourse is never disinterested, but rather seeks to authenticate itself through the devices of rhetoric and the relations of patronage. Yet, as we have seen, our familiarity with a text like Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which makes a theme of disavowing both these for a more inward source of authenticity, tempts us into easy swipes against the sycophancy of poets who rely on ‘rhetoric’. Take sonnet 82, for example, where Shakespeare laments that his true friend should prefer the impurely motivated hyperbole of rival poets to his own plain-speaking sincerity:

I grant thou were not married to my Muse And therefore maiest without attaint ore-looke The dedicated words which writers vse Of their faire subiect, blessing euery booke. Thou art as faire in knowledge as in hew, Finding thy worth a limmit past my praise, And therefore art inforc’t to seeke anew, Some fresher stampe of the time bettering dayes. And do so loue, yet when they haue deuisde, What strained touches Rhethoricke can lend, Thou truly faire, wert truly simpathizde, In true plaine words, by thy true telling friend. And their grosse painting might be better vs’d Where cheeks need blood, in thee it is abus’d.⁹

I suggested that the naturalness of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (the comprehensibility of their moral symbolism) depended on the fact that by rejecting as ‘false’ and ‘superficial’ the analogical techniques normally used in sonnets, they managed to persuade us of the possibility of a love and a poetry that might remain true to its subject. The possibility is so congenial to our way of thinking that we scarcely feel the need to gloss it, but how is it constructed? Here, in sonnet 82, the subject is described as being ‘as faire in knowledge as in hew’, so that his inward beauty is identified as a kind of connoisseurship, a capacity to value and to validate the text as a cultural artefact. And this is typical of the beauty ascribed to him. For though we tend to read the Sonnets as if they were explorative of an emotional relation between the poet and his masculine subject, an equally prominent feature is the text’s exploration of an interpretative and mutually authenticating relation between the text and its subject. Indeed, the Sonnets enable us to experience the inward beauty of intellectual discrimination which enables the friend —’ as faire in knowledge as in hew’—to judge the text, as itself an effect of the text. In the play of antitheses, we glimpse this authenticating, discriminating subject, the ‘friend’, in the process of being made up out of a comparative rhetoric which ambiguously privileges the contingencies of gender, of noble birth and a peculiarly ‘economic’ attitude to the text which is foreign to our assumptions about the purpose of reading. For example: the phrase ‘thou art as faire in knowledge as in hew’ refers us back to Shakespeare’s introduction of this unusual archaism in sonnet 20, where it disturbingly establishes the worth of a masculine as opposed to feminine poetic subject. The colours in the face of the ‘Master-Mistres’ are apparently authentic because he is ‘a man in hew all Hews in his controwling’. Here ‘hews’ means colours in the sense of complexion, but it also bears reading in a rhetorical sense as well, with colours being the equivalent of discursive ‘proofs’, ‘reasons’ or ‘arguments’ for action.¹⁰ ‘All Hews in his controwling’ thus indicates the reader’s specifically masculine relation to the text, in which, as he reads, he discovers or ‘invents’ a store of resources for his own future uses in improvisation, thereby increasing his power to produce emotionally compelling discourse and to control its colours. The relation between masculine author and masculine patron/reader emerges as inherently ‘virtuous’ (in the Renaissance sense of conducive to good action, rather than to theoretical speculation on the nature of good) by implicit comparison with the relation between masculine author and feminine pretext/reader, since the usual pretext of Petrarchan discourse —love for a woman —can only generate a ‘face’ or textual surface of rhetorical colours to be exploited by men. For, of course, it was only for men that Renaissance humanism identified the interpretative practices of reading with the prudence, or practical reason, which enables deliberation about action in political life. Only for men could the activity of reading be expected to increase the power to act and speak in emergency, to discover in the emergent moment an argument, a ‘colour’ for one’s own uses.¹¹ So, since only a man can effectively reproduce from a discourse which celebrates beauty, this power of discursive reproduction becomes his intrinsic beauty, and only a man can therefore be ‘truly’ beautiful. The sonnet puts this in a cleverly ‘moronic’ or oxymoronic fashion: only a man can have ‘a Womans face with natures owne hand painted’. The oxymoron is developed in the following sonnet, where the ambition to write ‘truly’ of a masculine beloved is defined against the marketplace comparisons of the poet ‘Stird by a painted beauty to his verse’ (21.2). All this, of course, is highly ambivalent, since the location of his ‘truth’ in a capacity to reproduce colours implies (perhaps through a pun on ‘hues’ and ‘use’) that the masculine ‘truth’ which distinguishes itself from feminine ‘paintedness’ is that eloquence which ‘heauen it selfe for ornament doth vse’ (21.3).

However, the ascription of authenticity to the friend as a reader engaged in producing an inner self through the rhetorical ‘finding out’ or ‘invention’ of the text’s colours for his own future hews/uses competes with his ascription of authenticating power as a patron. In sonnet 82, the suggestion of altitude in ‘ore-looke’ positions him less as a reader engaged in inventing discourse than as a nobleman, who, in the words of Sir Thomas Elyot, should be ‘set in a more highe place’ where he may ‘se and also be sene’ by ‘the beames of his excellent witte, shewed through the glasse of auctorite’ (the ‘authority’ or ‘authorship’ of policy making through patronage).¹² Again, in sonnet 20, the authority of the reader-as-patron to irradiate his image in the text is figured as exclusively masculine; the friend has a brighter, truer eye than any woman, an eye that is like the sun, ‘Gilding the object where-vpon it gazeth’. Thus, the friend’s ability to authenticate and enlarge the text’s sphere of influence, figured in his gilding eye and validating hue, sceptically reveals the notion of man’s ‘truth’ or his authentic inner nature, to consist in the privileging of a certain kind of discursive economy. Throughout the Sonnets ‘truth’ and ‘inward worth’ are articulated as the generative capacity of the text’s subject to forestall the dissipation of his own loveliness. What begins as a discourse of natural economy or husbandry—for the first seventeen sonnets the friend is playfully urged to convert his fading beauty to generative ‘store’ by begetting a son—is apparently superseded by the reproductive economy of the sonnet form itself, which enacts the conversion of beauty into discursive ‘store’. This latter is an economy precisely because it articulates the pleasurable encounter with the text, the moment of interpretation, as the assimilation of potential for the production of discourse which will stimulate others to take similar pleasure in understanding. If we think of reading in humanist terms as an exercise of the interpretative potential of the text, preparing for the discovery of interpretative potential in practical situations requiring decisive action, then the economy celebrated by the Sonnets could be referred to as an economy of ‘interpretative power’ or ‘interpretative virtue’. In his imaging of this economy, Shakespea...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: MINDING THE STORY
• 1: WHY THE LADY’S EYES ARE NOTHING LIKE THE SUN
• 2: YET TELL ME SOME SUCH FICTION’: LADY MARY WROTH’S URANIA AND THE ‘FEMININITY’ OF ROMANCE
• 3: MATERIAL GIRLS: THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY WOMAN DEBATE
• 4: BLAZING WORLDS: SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN’S UTOPIAN WRITING
• 5: MY BRAIN THE STAGE’: MARGARET CAVENDISH AND THE FANTASY OF FEMALE PERFORMANCE
• 6: THE PERSON I AM, OR WHAT THEY MADE ME TO BE’: THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE FEMININE SUBJECT IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF MARY CARLETON
• 7: WHORES’ RHETORIC AND THE MAPS OF LOVE: CONSTRUCTING THE FEMININE IN RESTORATION EROTICA
• 8: MANL(E)Y FORMS: SEX AND THE FEMALE SATIRIST
• 9: SPEAKING OF WOMEN: SCANDAL AND THE LAW IN THE MID- EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY