ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

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