Copyright © 1996 by Randall Martin, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Canadian and U.S. copyright laws. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent and the notification of the author (RMARTIN@unb.ca).
In two notes published several years ago, R.J. Fehrenbach speculated that the Elizabethan poet Isabella Whitney might have contributed a number of unsigned pieces to Thomas Proctor's Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions and Clement Robinson's A Handful of Pleasant Delights , miscellanies published in 1578 and 1584.[1] Current efforts to recover works by early modern women, as well as Whitney's distinction of being the first English female author seeking to earn money from her writing and one of only a dozen or so sixteenth-century women to reach print, encourage us to investigate Fehrenbach's suggestions. Of the three titles he proposes, the first two ("The complaint of a woman louer" in Pleasant Delights and "The Lady beloued exclaymeth of the great vntruth of her louer" in the Gorgeous Gallery) refer to ballads which unfortunately lack any defining authorial traits.[2] A third piece, however, "The lamentacion of a Gentilwoman vpon the death of her late deceased frend William Gruffith Gent," is more promising. It not pays tribute to an admired friend but also decries various social constraints affecting Elizabethan women, from which the poem's gendered speaker attempts to liberate herself by publishing her piece. Some of her arguments recall complaints made by Whitney in her known works about the difficulties of writing publicly as a woman; so if "The Lamentation" can be accepted as hers, it may come to be regarded as her boldest criticism of patriarchal silencing. In this paper I wish first to examine briefly the evidence in favour of her authorship. Fehrenbach's claims can be strengthened in a number of ways to make a case for Whitney that is highly probable, though it falls short of absolute proof. I shall then consider the poem's protest against society's devaluation of the speaker's non-marital friendship with Gruffith, and its creative resistance to the hostility she encounters in publicly mourning his death. In the end the poem recognizes a convergence between these several hostile customs and the professional obstacles Whitney faces as a female writer. The poem's decentred and ultimately self-withdrawing persona can be read as responding to these pressures, simultaneously deferring to and resisting their denial of her will to self-expression.
"The Lamentation"'s personal dedication and timely purpose [3] set it apart from the other merely conventional, moralizing complaints and love-poems in A Gorgeous Gallery, a volume printed by Richard Jones, publisher of Whitney's two earlier works, The Copy of a Letter(1567) and A Sweet Nosegay(1573). Jones seems to have been Whitney's exclusive publisher, and he later printed works by other women writers.[4] "The Lamentation" also draws attention to itself as one of two "extras" included after the main sequence of ballad and verse selections. These end with a valedictory poem by the editor, "T[homas] P[roctor] his Farewell vnto his faythfull and approoued freend F.S.":
Take heede, my woordes let teach thee to be wise, And learne thee shun, that leades thy minde to ill: Least beeing warnd, when as experience tries, Thou waylst to late, the woes, of wicked will.FINIS. T.P.
A doutfull, dying, dolefull, Dame, Not fearing death, nor forcing life, Nor caring ought for flitting fame, Emongst such sturdy stormes of strife: Here doth shee mourne and write her will, Vpon her liked Louers ende....(Gorgeous GalleryP2v )[7]
There also appear to be a few minor stylistic links with several of Whitney's known poems. While none of these works exhibits unusual word-choice providing any substantial basis for attribution, there may be one or two connections. "The Lamentation"'s opening line as well as the 49th flower of Whitney's Sweet Nosegay(B7r ) both contain the word "preace", a by-form of press current until the early 1500s but old-fashioned by 1578.[10] The author also calls "The Lamentation" a "scroule" (50, 63), a term associated with epistolary writings during this period and therefore unusual for an elegy, but perhaps telling for the same reason since Whitney twice uses it to describe her own verse-letters in A Sweet Nosegay:e.g. "To two of her yonger Sisters seruinge iu [sic] London" (D1r]) and "To her Cosen F.W." (D2v ). On the other hand "The Lamentation"'s rhyme-scheme (ababcc) exactly matches that of "To her Sister Misteris A.B." in A Sweet Nosegay (D1v -D2r ). One rhyme-formula in particular,
But William had a worldly freend in store ... But I. and H. his name did show no more("Lamentation" 37, 39)
And when you shall this letter haue let it be kept in store? [sic] For she that sent ye same, hath sworn as yet to send no more.("To her vnconstant Louer" A5r )
Trust not a man at the fyrst sight, but trye him well before: I wish al Maids within their brests to kepe this thing in store("vnconstant Louer" A6v )
But sith thy fortune is so yll to end thy lyfe on shore: Of this thy most vnhappy end, I minde to speake no more.("vnconstant Louer" A8r)
If we can consider "The Lamentation" to be by Whitney, her favoured term "scroule" not only suggests a link with her own earlier works but also hints at a common source of inspiration identified previously by Ann Rosalind Jones: Ovid's Heroides, familiar to sixteenth-century readers from numerous translations such as George Turberville's Heroycall Epistles ... of Ovidius(1567).[11] Several of these verse-epistles depict famous heroines -- Phyllis, Dido, Medea -- bewailing their abandonment and humiliation at the hands of unfaithful lovers. "The Lamentation" echoes Heroides's typical presentation of a single bereft woman but adapts it to a different kind of crisis: the death of the speaker's close friend, and possibly her lover, William Gruffith. The woman in this case is victimized not by the personal treachery of one man (or as a female collectivity by men) but by death itself, defined as a universal and non-allegorized event ("Eche man doth mone, when faythfull freends bee dead"; random fate does not become a phallically authorized Fate.) Such a change allows the speaker to present herself as a new kind of subject-persona, no longer subordinated by conventional gender or genre roles. Gruffith's death forces her to confront the depth of her emotional reliance on him, as well as the loss of his validation of her inner life. Initially her response is to mourn him openly as a widow would do. But she quickly encounters hostility as an unmarried woman expressing grief and so must seek another mode of release. Paradoxically, being stifled by a socially unspeakable loss impels her towards another kind of forbidden display: writing about her grief. In overcoming this barrier she effectively re-enacts her mourning, thereby not only easing her pain but also legitimizing her position as a female writer, since the poem asserts her right to speak authoritatively about Gruffith as well as her own feelings. The public notice announced by the poem also serves a deep need in terms of the speaker's social identity, since it creates a material validation substituting for Gruffith's lost conferral of worth as a fellow writer. Being recognizable as an elegist now fulfills a psychic longing equivalent to the status of widow, and before that of lover, each of which society would seek to forbid. In "The Lamentation" Whitney goes much further than in her earlier verse-letters in reworking the Ovidian heroic model to wrest for the female speaker a degree of self-realization unavailable to her generic predecessors.
Whereas in Ovid the heroine's complaints of cruelty are addressed chiefly to her faithless male lover,[12] here the speaker directs them at contemporary social custom which denies women the opportunity of displaying intense public grief for men who are not their husbands or family relations. She winces at disapproval of behaviour considered to be exclusively the prerogative of widows, and at the implied illegitimacy of deep male-female love expressed outside of marriage:
Yet hurtfull eyes doo bid mee cast away In open show this carefull blacke attyre, Because it would my secret loue bewray And pay my pate with hatred for my hyre....(19-22)Clearly the speaker feels that if she were married to Gruffith her love and grief would be taken seriously, but as she is not they are discounted. Insofar as marriage is the privileging state, Whitney's poem implies a yearning for the social identity it affords comparable to her earlier verse-letters, though expressed here in a more indirect way. Without a faithful lover or husband she feels herself to be unclassified as a poor unmarried gentlewoman; hence a previous identification with the disenfranchised in her somewhat bitterly nostalgic "Manner of her Will". While reluctantly giving up the right to mourn Gruffith, and in the absence of other acceptable roles for bereaved single women, Whitney nonetheless remains determined to defend her right to grieve for and honour Gruffith, so she turns to writing.
This carries her into another exclusive domain, however, in which she faces disapproval even greater than that towards public mourning. To prepare the ground for Procter and Jones's male readers (invoked by Anthony Munday's opening poem, "Vnto all yong Gentilmen, in commendacion of this Gallery"), she introduces several conciliatory gestures designed to lessen resistance towards a female author. By recalling the subjected positions of Ovid's plangent heroines, for example, she curtseys towards prevailing gender ideology. She likewise deploys traditional modesty topos in a triple disavowal of artistic ambition:
With Poets pen I doo not preace to write, Mineruaes mate I doo not boast to bee, Parnassus Mount (I speake it for no spite) Can cure my cursed cares....(1-4)In the same vein Whitney later cites her "weake wits" and lack of a "grauer stile" (31-2) as reasons for not attempting to write Gruffith's epitaph. Such self-disabling extends her opening gambit, downplays her literary ambitions, and clears away possible complications with other pre-ideologized genres. These self-effacing manoeuvres serve to construct a sense of conventional gender decorum expected by many of her male readers in A Gorgeous Gallery.
On the other hand the urgency of Whitney's crisis demands a less supine persona, which she goes about constructing in several ways. The change in situation from sexual betrayal in Heroidesto bereavement widens the field of possible literary precedents, and as the poem unfolds its generic links diversify to include authorizing models other than Ovid. Like famous women writers of religious lamentations such as Katherine Parr and Lady Jane Grey,[13] she shifts her appeal away from an exclusively male audience: "You Ladyes all, that passe not for no payne ... / I craue your aydes, to helpe mee mourne amayne" (25, 27). And in a strategy common to many hesitant female writers of the time, Whitney partly excuses her task by citing the overwhelming human need to unburden her grief: "Yet must I needes deplore my Gruffithes graue ... / And wayle my freend, who is but lately dead" (12, 18). In contrast to the ventriloquised ladies who supplicate and moan elsewhere in A Gorgeous Gallery, "The Lamentation" speaks to the expectations of both a male and female audience, dually importuned by modesty on the one hand and experiential solidarity on the other.[14]
Having hedged herself with passive supports, Whitney can begin to challenge more directly the exclusionary customs of contemporary discourse and to promote herself as the authentic custodian of Gruffith's memory. She observes that men have the privilege of "paynting out" the reputations of departed friends as casually as their varying abilities permit ("as well as wits doo serue"), since men wholly define what "native wit" consists of. Women on the other hand must be inventive to the point of being extraordinary, yet always subordinate, simply to be heard: "But I, a Mayde, am forst to vse my head" (9). Later Whitney becomes bolder when she ridicules the inadequacy of I.H., a would-be male eulogist who posted some slap-dash verses to Gruffith at St. Paul's: "One ryme too low, another rampes too hye ... / [he] vttered all the skill that God had sent" (42, 44).[15] Rather than demurely seconding I.H.'s opinions and ignoring his limitations, she repudiates the "Rime Ruffe" of this "worldly freend" as insulting to her subject (37, 40). By declaring her intention of replacing its "small effect" with something meaningful, she claims superior competence in speaking for Gruffith and implicitly asserts the value of her own feelings and judgement. At this point the elegy's aims move beyond simply lamenting Gruffith's death (in the end we actually learn very little about him) to something unexpected: a manifesto of the speaker's ability to express herself in print and to influence (predominantly male) public opinion -- all the more striking if this is Isabella Whitney, since then it also becomes a protest by an aspiring female author against the privileged gentleman amateur.
The fact that she contests I.H.'s work at St. Paul's where "euery man goes by" -- one of London's central places of social, economic, and bibliographic exchange -- also challenges conventional restrictions on women circulating themselves and their ideas. We noted earlier that even though the unfamiliar intensity of her loss makes the speaker feel "widowed," she ceases to mourn for fear of being accused of misappropriating behaviour due only in wives to husbands. Partly at issue is the sexual innuendo she risks by revealing any close relationship with a man. Men can initiate love-relationships whether they are married or not; even if the woman offers resistance, they can, as courtly writers, make a conventional virtue of necessity by rebaptizing their desires as spiritualized love and recuperating them as stages on a path towards metaphysical enlightenment. Such neo-Platonic remedies offer no potential comfort to Whitney's speaker, however, for the same reason that they later fail for female characters such as Lady Mary Wroth's Pamphilia in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621). Cultural and class decorum prohibit the latter from openly seizing Amphilanthus's attentions when they wander, let alone imitating the Petrarchan model by inscribing her desires upon apostrophized male body-parts; and since Amphilanthus remains nearly voiceless, her own love remains ungratified, robbed of any subjective power. By contrast, because Whitney's speaker is not following a courtly, neo-Platonic tradition, she avoids being trapped by the same dilemma. Her poem manages instead to subvert conventional taboos by actively representing her true desires -- subtly through its redeployment of gestures of mourning, aggressively in her rivalry with I.H. She also takes advantage of the poem's occasion by declaring herself to be the true public voice of Gruffith, positioning "him" as a corroborator of their personal and professional relationship. By doing so Whitney inscribes the "manner of her will" a second time, but now to more lasting effect. Instead of dramatizing possession and dispersal of an imagined heritage in which nomination and selection of goods serve as a temporary controlling fiction to displace a chronic absence of bodily and mental fulfilment,[16] here the gulf between will and vacancy is bridged by laying claim to the legacy of Gruffith's public reputation. This has real currency both as a marketable commodity (the recognition value of "By W.G.") and as a cultural warrant (an enabling male colleague). Whitney's strategy recalls the much more extreme case of Anne Askew and John Bale, in which Bale profited from repackaging and, to some degree, distorting the quietly heroic voice of his subject. Whitney's use of Gruffith is substantially different; but by having him "witness" her written performance, she similarly empowers her own will and vocation.
Also at issue in the speaker's determination to mourn Gruffith is the social disruption she threatens to cause by violating the equivalent of Elizabethan sumptuary laws. Ostensibly these were designed to restrict importation of foreign luxury materials to protect English industry. But their more important purpose was to reflect strict rank in people's clothes and inhibit social mobility.[17] Between 1559 and 1597 the Queen issued nine proclamations specifying colour, quality, quantity, price, and style of material on a graduated scale according to status and means. The final proclamation admitted the failure of these laws to achieve the desired ends: "partly through negligence and partly by the manifest contempt and disobedience of the parties offending, no reformation hath followed."[18] Yet this does not mean the law's force was not felt keenly at certain periods, especially by women. For the proclamations of 1562 and 1566 established a system of public surveillance which was to continue for about 15 years, whereby London officials appointed watchmen at each entrance-gate to the City to supervise the daily wearing of correct apparel. Offenders, who were more often apprentices and servants than citizens, were brought before magistrates at the Guildhall.[19] In the proclamation of 1574 separate laws were added regulating women's apparel. As Peter Stallybrass observes, this "tardiness in the statues should be seen as a sign less of women's liberties [prior to 1574] than of the implicit assumption that women's bodies were already the object of policing."[20] And this is confirmed by the fact that in the area of regular and mourning apparel, laws for women had already been set forth in 1503 by Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby and mother of Henry VII. Like the Elizabethan sumptuary laws, they were graduated lists prescribing etiquette, fabrics, and colours that were to remain in force until the late sixteenth century.[21]
Overall, then, the 1560s and 70s -- the period in which Isabella Whitney is known to have been writing -- were a time of maximum enforcement of customary attire, and for women this included mourning apparel in particular. The latter was crucial because it flagged a wife's continuing submission to her dead husband's authority and marked her role as a guarantor of dynastic exchange relations; widow's weeds safeguarded the legitimate transmission of his property. In this regard even though Whitney's speaker abandons mourning in black -- understandable in the context just outlined -- and so avoids the appearance of a sexually consummated but patriarchally unregulated relationship which mourning as a single woman might otherwise suggest, she states that prior to Gruffith's death she "wore" green, white, and red as a sign of her inner feelings for him (13-18). Together these colours function as a blazon, recalling the poetic device's origins in heraldic colour-symbolism (modesty again restricting an inventory of physical features, as in the Petrarchan model).[22] The speaker's desires are refracted in several facets after being projected on to Gruffith, who stands as a trope, as we have seen, for professional recognition as well as her emotional life. The colours themselves suggest a mix of passion (red, suggesting suffering as well as amorous feeling) and devotion (green and white) -- a combination not dissimilar, in fact, to the overdetermined cultural significance of black alone. Whitney's speaker poetically renegotiates the contentious issue of dress-regulation by retroactively investing her former "apparel" with symbolic value, thereby defeating society's intended erasure of her independent display of desire.
The same potential "hatred" she courts by "wearing" these desires publicly also confronts women's writing, which anti-female authors of the time habitually equated with promiscuity: openness in print, like affective behaviour, signalled sexual availability. This cultural marking also considerably increased for women the force of prevailing social prejudices against publication. To counter these negative reactions, the speaker pursues further some of the representational strategies of paradox and ambivalence that mark her persona.[23] One instance is the mixing of terms she uses to describe her relationship with Gruffith: lover, friend, mate. Though all these may imply "marriage(able) partner," they alternate with the non-sexual sense of well-wisher or close associate (e.g. mate OED 2), definitions which gain prominence if we assume Gruffith to be the W.G. of The Copy of a Letter, since then they would have shared the experience of being disappointed in love. The speaker apparently also signals the non-sexual nature of their friendship in the comparison to Damon and Pythias (36). On the other hand her multi-layered motives maintain the suggestion of sexually will'-ful desires in her diction. Yet since she aims to surpass I.H.'s inadequate efforts in order to advertise her own finer skill and sensibility, it is prudent to maintain a rhetorical degree of "indifference," especially in view of the ever-present liability of being labelled "a maid." By avoiding certainty about a sexual liaison, she deflects absolute charges of partiality and further distances herself from the generic essentialism of her Ovidian predecessors.
Recognizing the paradoxes of Whitney's ambitious self-disabling also helps explain a pair of obscure lines -- declared "unintelligible" by an earlier editor [24] -- which immediately follows the challenge to I.H.:
But I am shee that neuer will refuse, But as I am, so will I still bee bent. (45-6)Whitney declares her joint responsibility to the memory of her friend and to her own calling as a writer. The first line suggests she will neither "decline challenging" I.H. as a rival (OED refuse 4c) nor "abandon" her friend when inferior tributes threaten his reputation (OED refuse 4b). Nor will she undervalue her own judgement (OED refuse 4) by adopting the false consciousness which prevailing customs and literary models would force upon her. In this regard one more possible sense of "neuer will refuse" -- to decline to bear a name (OED 5b) -- becomes ironic, for at the end of the poem she withdraws from full self-disclosure ("aske no more of mee"). She does so partly to avoid petty objections but also to prevent detractors from reducing her multivalent speech to the tokenism which Proctor's placement of the poem at the end A Gorgeous Gallery might otherwise signify. The sense of "bent" in the second line resonates with the same tension between objectified and self-determining personas. As a woman she is familiar with playing a submissive role (OED bend 1, 10), as the poem's opening lines demonstrate. But at the same time she is "resolved" not to devalue either her own creative disposition (a semantic cross-over from bent, sb.), or the emotional and perhaps even spiritual dimensions of her friendship with Gruffith (OED bend 19). The latter she twice characterises by the phrase "lincked loue," whose underlying image of a couple arm-in-arm suggests mutuality, while the alternative of going hand-in-hand signifies devotion (OED link v. 2). Again the virtual equivalence of marriage is insisted upon but not settled.
The faintly combative tone of this passage may also clarify the unexpected comparison to Hector in the poem's first stanza, who in retrospect becomes a figure for the speaker's self-presentation overall. In The Iliad when Hector is being tracked down by Achilles, Minerva (Pallas Athena) tricks him into thinking his brother Deiphobus is coming to his aid. Hector recognizes the goddess's deception too late, and when he dies his body is ignobly mutilated in an attempt to desecrate his legendary stature. In terms of fame, however, there is no loss: Hector's supreme heroism is affirmed by the extremity and pathos of his suffering. Whitney's comparison suggests she seeks renown from the same kind of self-authorizing passion, while rejecting any poetic kinship with Minerva (whose alternative patronage of spinners and weavers some "Zoylus sot" might consider more appropriate occupations for a female writer):
So liue I shall, when death hath spit her spight, And Lady Fame will spread my prayse, I know, And Cupids Knights will neuer cease to write And cause my name through Europe for to flow; And they that know what Cupid can preuayle, Will blesse the ship that floates with such a sayle.(85-90) Though the complaint of being subjected to as "many woes" as Hector is hyperbolic, the cultural barriers ranged against Whitney's successful determination to publish her will (which Proctor commends in his introductory verses) validate her emblematized self-display in terms of classical heroes celebrated for similar acts of suffering and resistance.
A second related persona materializes in the reference to Admetus and Alcestis at lines 106-10. Apollo obtained extended life for Admetus from the Fates provided that Admetus could find somebody to die in his place. His wife Alcestis agreed, laying down her life to save her husband, and subsequently she became a type of female conjugal devotion. In the continuing story in Euripides, however, Alcestis is brought back from hell by Heracles, who had been cheerfully entertained by Admetus despite his grief, and in the Renaissance version Heracles becomes allegorized as a Christ-figure, wrestling with Death to resurrect Alcestis.[25] It is significant that the speaker does not identify herself with the virtuous but self-sacrificing Alcestis, here equated with Gruffith. Instead, by actively salvaging his reputation and perpetuating their intimacy, she reverses traditional gender roles, saving both herself and Gruffith from the cultural and literary nullity Elizabethan society would impose. Moreover as a female Heracles (often figured as a Renaissance emblem of eloquence), the speaker implicitly attributes to her art the same transfiguring power that metamorphosed Narcissus -- here too equated with Gruffith -- beyond death. Therefore when at the end of the poem she once more sounds the elegiac note of Heroides ("For as I am, a Louer will I dye"), by this point the distance from the "I" of Ovid's bereft heroines is vast. Through her own efforts the speaker has traversed the no-man's-land between self-negation and self-assertion which characterizes other female legacies,[26] to achieve a permanently self-defining memorial.[27]
Graunt (Muses nyne) your sacred skill, Helpe to assist your mournfull freend: Embouldned with your Nimphish ayde, Shee will not cease, but seeke to singe: And eke employ her willing head, Her Gruffithes prayse, with ruthe to ringe.(Gorgeous Gallery P2v)Back
Or els the Gods some fragrant flower would send, Which for his sake, I might both weare and smell: Which flower out of my hand shall neuer passe, But in my harte shall haue a sticking place.("Lamentation" 111-14)
Good reader now you tasted haue and smelt of all my flowers ... But if thy selfe do lothe the sent. gene [sic] others leaue to weare them.("A farewell to the Reader" 1, 4) Back Ann Rosalind Jones discusses the connections between Heroides and Whitney's earlier poems in The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe 1540-1620 (Bloomington, 1990), p. 43ff.Back A significant variation is the letter of Sappho to Phaon. Back Katherine Parr, The Lamentation of a Sinner (London, 1547); Lady Jane Grey, An Exhortation written by the Lady Jane the Night Before She Suffered (London, 1554).Back Jones observes Whitney directing her attentions to a similar double audience in "The admonition ... to all yong Gentilwomen" (Jones, Currency, 49-50). Back Perhaps Jasper Heywood, as Rollins suggests (Gorgeous Gallery, n. 117.34, p. 205). His name appears on the title-page as one of the contributors to Richard Edwards's Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576), a popular forerunner of The Gorgeous Gallery. Edwards wrote a well-known play about Damon and Pythias (cf. line 36) around 1565. The reference to their story just before I.H. is mentioned may possibly provide a clue to his identity.Back