ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
reality of this “other” bond between them: that of a reciprocated female
loyalty.
Lanyer’s verse might best be regarded then as giving voice to this “other”
bond in a context that openly recognizes, and at times laments, the significant
disparity in rank that divides the author from her potential patronesses. In this
sense, Lanyer is both the creator of an imagined “female community”—to adopt
momentarily Barbara Lewalski’s phrasing—and the odd person out. She is the
only one without any claim to title except as a woman “writing of divinest
things”; but it is a title that has value in Jacobean England only as the value of
woman is consciously amplified. We hear, therefore, of not one but many
women, about their accomplishments in the past and present in many different
capacities: ruler, nurturer, mother, moral guide, poet, visionary, with specific
names attached to each. And we hear from many women within the poem
lamenting the death of Jesus. We find, too, at the center of Salve Deus a Jesus
with barely a drop of patriarchal blood in his body. As Lanyer reminds “The
Vertuous Reader” of the Preface in a remark that illuminates the structure of her
own account of the Passion narrative itself, the Son of God was “begotten of a
woman, borne of a woman, nourished of a woman, obedient to a woman; and
that he healed woman, pardoned women, comforted women: yea, even when he
was in his greatest agonie and bloodie sweat, going to be crucified, and also in
the last houre of his death, tooke care to dispose of a woman; after his
resurrection, appeared first to a woman, sent to declare his most glorious
resurrection to the rest of his Disciples” (pp. 49–50).
And we hear from one female witness in particular not mentioned in the
above catalog. The most original and now most often anthologized portion of
Salve Deus occurs when another “wife” is asked to speak. The woman known in
the Passion story only as Pilate’s wife is mentioned only in Matthew, and then
only in a single sentence as follows: when Pilate “was set down on the judgment
seat, his wife sent unto him, saying, Have thou nothing to do with that just man:
for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him” (Matthew
27:19). Compared to the more familiar activities of the Hebraic heroines or the
New Testament women mentioned by Lanyer in “To the Vertuous Reader,” the
part played by Pilate’s wife in the Bible is small indeed and is generally treated
so by Scriptural commentators. The Geneva Bible does not even bother to gloss
the incident, even though Calvin in his Commentary on the Harmony of the
Evangelists called her dream an example of the “extraordinary inspiration of
God” and defended her against “the commonly supposed [view] that the devil
stirred up this woman in order to retard the redemption of mankind.” 20
Lanyer was probably drawn to “this woman,” however, not because of
Calvin’s defense but for the same reason that her contemporary Lady Anne
Southwell was: Pilate’s wife was regarded as a domestic paragon, an example of
the good wife offering counsel to her wayward husband. 21 She was obviously a
figure who would be viewed sympathetically by Lanyer’s immediate audience.
But if Lanyer was counting on this association, she also wished to amplify
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