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