ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
historical reasons as well for grouping women poets together since it is frequently
the case that, whatever the chosen genre or topic, the shaping perspective was
self-consciously female, although in no single or simple way. And, again in no
single or simple way, as this chapter will emphasize, women began to participate
in the broader phenomenon of authorship that is so decisive a feature of late
sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English culture. While the sixteenth
century witnessed a number of remarkably learned women, especially among the
courtly elite—the names of Lady Jane Grey, Queen Elizabeth, and Mary Sidney,
the Countess of Pembroke, come quickly to the lips—it is not until the early
seventeenth century that independently authored volumes of verse begin to
appear on the horizon as an active, if not sustained, demonstration of poetic
literacy by women. To the Tudor habits of frequent paraphrase, translation, and
supplementation, then, is added the occasional female venture into individual
expression, sometimes, as in the case of Aemilia Lanyer, of a decidedly feminist
kind.
By inviting us to think about women poets of the seventeenth century,
moreover, recent scholars have helpfully laid to rest the myth of “Judith
Shakespeare,” Virginia Woolf’s colorful but anachronistic belief that:
any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would
certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some
lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and
mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that the
highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have
been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled
asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her
health and sanity to a certainty. 2
As has been recently documented, over 650 first editions of works were
published by women in the seventeenth century; 3 and in addition to these
publicly visible signs of literary activity, one must also take into account the
considerable part women played in the manuscript culture of the time as either
recipient or author or both. Even if a precise reckoning of their participation is
impossible to determine, we know on the basis of anecdote and inference that
among some elite circles women were more active as poets than existing textual
evidence will support. Jonson’s tantalizing remark to Drummond that “The
Countess of Rutland was nothing inferior to her father, S[ir] P.Sidney, in poesy”
is well known, 4 although not a word of the countess’s verse has come to light;
and as the epigraph to this chapter suggests, Henry King, the Bishop of
Chichester, friend of Donne, and author of “The Exequy,” participated in a circle
that, while recognizing wider cultural limits placed on female expression,
encouraged women to think of the private “table-book” as an appropriate place
to “become” both “Scribe and Authour.”
In accepting the revisionist view, however, that women of the period not only
211