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 />
Reader”). All are directed to important women of the day, this one to Queen<br />
Anne:<br />
Renowned Empresse, and great Britaines Queene,<br />
Most gratious Mother of succeeding Kings;<br />
Vouchsafe to view that which is seldome scene,<br />
A Womans writing of divinest things:<br />
Reade it faire Queene, though it defective be,<br />
Your Excellence can grace both It and Mee. 18<br />
Compared to the shadowy, intricately wrought “rooms” of Mary Wroth’s sonnets,<br />
Lanyer’s verse seems emphatically available. The above stanza unfolds with the<br />
clean sweep of a bow, its announcement decorous but fully audible. What is<br />
announced, though, is not the presentation of a literary work alone or even an<br />
image of “A Womans writing of divinest things,” but a view of what is “seldom<br />
scene”: a not quite private showing of female authorship as a significant event<br />
in and of itself—not quite private because the woman writing to the queen here<br />
is also doing so in a style remarkable for its lucidity. We clearly observe a woman<br />
writing before the queen about becoming visible as a woman writer, or more<br />
precisely, about becoming visible because she is a woman writer. In 1611—the<br />
year in which the King James Bible first appeared—this was a startling claim to<br />
make in public.<br />
Much of our interest in Salve Deus is consequently of an historical or<br />
archeological nature. Who are the women addressed in the commendatory<br />
poems? What is Lanyer’s relationship to them: the Lanyer identified on the 1611<br />
title page as “Wife to Captaine Alfonso Lanyer Servant to the Kings Majestie,”<br />
but also the Lanyer who once enjoyed “great pomp” as mistress to Henry Cary,<br />
Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain, and in a series of revealing conversations<br />
in 1597 with the astrologer Simon Forman, expressed anxiety over not having<br />
made a fortunate marriage. 19 And, of course, what did she hope to accomplish<br />
by dedicating poems to so many women: not just Queen Anne of Denmark and<br />
“great Britaines Queene,” but, in the following order, Princess Elizabeth, the<br />
eldest daughter of the king and queen, “all vertuous Ladies in generall,” James’s<br />
first cousin, Lady Arabella Stuart, Ladie Susan Montgomery, Countess of Kent,<br />
Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, Lucy, Countess of Bedford, Katherine<br />
(Howard), Countess of Suffolk, Anne (Clifford), Countess of Dorset, and finally<br />
and for good measure, the “vertuous reader” in general. When one adds to this<br />
list of commendatory poems the concluding “Description of Cooke-ham,”<br />
Lanyer’s personal recollection of her early days on the Clifford estate, we have a<br />
collection in which the framing material nearly equals in length the poem that<br />
is the occasion for the dedicatory addresses themselves: Lanyer’s “complaint” on<br />
the Passion of Jesus that serves as the centerpiece and title for the volume, Salve<br />
Deus Rex Judaeorum.<br />
As some of her modern readers have noted, Lanyer has taken more than a<br />
220