ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
occasion). Nor is it surprising that modern feminists frequently mark such
published speech acts as “transgressive.”
With access to the official educational institutions closed to them whatever
their rank—women were not allowed to attend university, a point lamented by
Martha Moulesworth—the domestic sphere of the home constituted the basic
and in many instances the only classroom for women in this period. Given the
literary prominence of a number of households in Tudor and Stuart England, this
situation need hardly be construed as intellectually impoverishing. Writing in
the middle of the Restoration, Bathsua Makin, one of the most learned women
of the age and the former royal tutor of Elizabeth, daughter to Charles I, readily
recited the names of women associated with some of the great households of the
recent past as part of her argument that “Women have been good Poets”: “the
four Daughters of Sir Anthony Cook, also the Lady Russel, the Lady Bacon, the
Lady Killegrew…the beautiful and learned Lady Mary, Countess of Pembrook, the
worthy Sister to that incomparable Person Sir Philip Sidney… The Lady Jane
Grey, and the Lady Arabella [Stuart],” as well as Queen Elizabeth and Lord
Burleigh’s “three Daughters.” 6 Other names, too, a bit further down the social
scale could be easily added: Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland and only child
of a prosperous lawyer; Lady Anne Southwell, of a prominent family from
Devon; or Lucy Hutchinson, the daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, Lieutenant of the
Tower. But for a good many women drawn from the less educated classes, the
domestic life—and its hardships—constituted the sole subject for verse: from the
rhymed “sayings” of one Katherine Dowe, a dairy wife at Sibton
Abbey, Suffolk,
Arise earelie
Serve God devoutly.
Then to they [sic] work bustlie
To thy meat joyfully
To thy bed merilie
And though thou fare poorely
And thy lodging homelie
Yet thank God highly, 7
to the painful couplets by the twice married Lady Mary Carey as she prepares to
bury yet another child,
What birth is this; a poore despissed creature?
A little Embrio; voyd of life, and feature. 8
To all but a select few women in the earlier seventeenth century, the notion of
belonging to a “clan” or “tribe” other than one’s immediate family would have
seemed beyond the pale, and even in these instances the notion of “belonging”
would have to be carefully qualified. Dryden’s famous remark at the end of the
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