[In the following essay, Ng contends that Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum illustrates how Lanyer used both religious and feminist rhetoric as a means for securing patronage for her writing.]

The religious core of Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judæorum (1611) has been too easily dismissed by some critics as at best peripheral to her true subject of the “commendable qualities of women” and at worst merely self-serving “art for lucre's sake.”¹ But compare, for instance, George Herbert's “Submission,” from his very popular devotional work The Temple (1633), in which the poet pleads before God: “Were it not better to bestow / Some place and power on me? / Then should thy praises with me grow, / And share in my degree.”² God's grace is figured here in profane terms of earthly advancement. Herbert immediately recants: “Perhaps great places and the praise / Do not so well agree” (“Submission”; hereafter cited as S, 15-16). But there is a note of doubt in the modifying “perhaps.” The penultimate line too is suggestive in the context of the preceding requests for “place and power”: “Only do thou lend me a hand” (S, 19). Herbert does not entirely give up—may even be reiterating—his supplication for divine patronage.

Herbert's poem illustrates how easily can religious devotion in the seventeenth century be expressed in the language of patronage. Conversely, religious rhetoric is used to characterize the patron-client relationship in the early modern period. In her study of early Stuart patronage, Linda Levy Peck points out that Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, reassures his client Charles Cornwallis of his continued support with words charged with religious resonance, such as “election,” “vows,” and “faith.”³ Sir Walter Raleigh asks James I for mercy by comparing the monarch to God: “the more my misery is the more is your Majesty's great mercy if you please to behold it, and the less I can deserve the more liberal your Majesty's gift. God only your Majesty shall imitate herein, both in giving freely, and in giving to such a one from whom there can be no retribution.”⁴ Not surprisingly, given the Stuart emphasis on a divine right sovereignty, James I himself says of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham: “Christ had his John and I have my George.”⁵ Peck writes that in the 1620s petitions to Buckingham, the king's favorite, “requesting his intercession with the king increasingly emphasized the patron as saint.”⁶ The religious devotion of the genre of dedications is remarked upon even by contemporaries: in the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, the actors John Heminge and Henry Condell write in their dedication to William and Philip Herbert that “we have justly observed, no man to come near your L. L. but with a kind of religious address.”⁷

Viewed in this cultural context, Aemilia Lanyer's merging of religious devotion and secular celebration is no longer anomalous—only that her enterprise is on a larger scale, encompassing an entire poem. Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judæorum would benefit from being situated within the broader context of the Stuart court's political culture, a context in which the linguistic interpenetration of the secular and the religious sphere is common.⁸ Such a contextualization, as well as careful attention to where Lanyer conforms to prevalent poetic practices in soliciting patronage and where she departs from them, will allow us to make two important corrections to recent discussions of this poet. It will permit us first to reassess the scholarship of the last decade or so that has read Lanyer as a proto-feminist and second to problematize the straightforward account of Salve Deus and its accompanying “Description of Cooke-ham” as Lanyer's creation of a female community.⁹

Aemilia Lanyer published her poem on the Passion of Christ to solicit patronage, not simply to celebrate it. We ought to keep in mind the financial distress that Lanyer found herself in during the decades before and, indeed, after the 1611 publication of Salve Deus Rex Judæorum. Lanyer could not afford to alienate any potential patron. Her husband, Alphonso, had exhausted the wealth she brought with her as dowry. We know that money problems were on her mind from the fact that in 1597 she consulted with the astrologer Simon Forman several times and quite bluntly asked him “whether she shall be a Ladi. & how she shall speed.”¹⁰ After her husband's death in 1613, Lanyer had to keep school from 1617 until 1619, when she was embroiled in a legal dispute with her landlord.¹¹ Lanyer, as we see from Forman's notes, was also an ambitious woman, aspiring to rise into the gentry class.

By overemphasizing Lanyer's feminism, we lose sight of important class tensions within the poem (that partly arise from her own class aspirations) and obscure the complexity of her poem as she negotiates the patron-client relationship. Ann Baines Coiro rightly reads Lanyer in relation to Ben Jonson, another aspiring middle-class poet, rather than to aristocratic women poets like Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke or Lady Mary Wroth. Coiro perceptively notes that Lanyer's “writing is as edgy, self-fashioning, and socially self-conscious as Jonson's ever is.”¹² Keeping Coiro's insight in mind, I want to make two related arguments here: first, the language of the poem itself reveals Lanyer's difficulties in praising women; second, the problematic status of the so-called community of good women has much to do with Lanyer's negotiation of class hierarchy in the Stuart court system and her bid for patronage in a highly patriarchal world, even if her would-be patrons at first appear to be confined to women alone. In fact, not only patriarchy disrupts the ideal of a community of women in Lanyer's poetry, but also Lanyer's need to play to a range of audiences—including a group of aristocratic women who may or may not be friends. In addition, Lanyer has the difficult and unpleasant task of getting people to loosen their purse-strings.

Lanyer's praise of women is not as straightforward as Barbara K. Lewalski implies in her reading of Salve Deus Rex Judæorum as “a comprehensive ‘Book of Good Women.’” Lewalski mentions without irony Chaucer's Legend of Good Women as a possible model, suggesting that “Anne Clifford might have directed her [Lanyer] to Chaucer: much later in her life (1649), Anne declared Chaucer to be a favorite poet and a great consolation to her in trouble.”¹³ Chaucer's work, of course, may be read as ironic commentary on the hagiographic convention. Even if we do not go so far as to claim that Lanyer is engaged in a thorough revision of the genre, the little evidence we do have suggests that Lanyer manipulated multiple dedications in her difficult search for patronage.

It is wrong to assume, as Lewalski does, that the dedications “would fail of their purpose if they were to falsify too outrageously the terms of a relationship.”¹⁴ Michael Brennan's research has shown that multiple dedications were common in the frenzied court environment, where patronage was unpredictable and the position of the writer extremely insecure. We are well acquainted with Spenser's seventeen dedicatory poems to The Faerie Queene (1596). But there were others who went even further: Henry Lok's book of religious poetry, Ecclesiastes (1597), was dedicated to sixty names, while Geoffrey Whitney dedicated A Choice of Emblems (1586) to over ninety potential patrons. Later, when preparing a copy for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lok only retained the appropriate commendatory sonnet, which he had printed on a leaf facing the title-page. Brennan further observes that “generalised panegyrics were sometimes printed with a blank space left for a suitable name to be entered at a later stage.”¹⁵ For instance, the Lambeth Library copy of A. Darcie's The Honour of Ladies (1622) has a blank space left where the name of Lady Anne Herbert is added to the page in the copy owned by the British Library.¹⁶

Lewalski's own archival work on the presentation copies of Lanyer's poem shows a similar manipulation of the dedications to fit the recipient—a discovery that would seem to require a more skeptical reading of the poem.¹⁷ The presentation copy for Prince Henry (probably given to him by Margaret Clifford)—the Dyce copy in the Victoria and Albert Museum—omits the dedications to Arabella Stuart, who was in disgrace, suspected of aspiring to the crown by secretly marrying William Seymour in 1610, and sent to the Tower in March 1611; the Countess of Suffolk, who was a member of the Catholic Howard family and thus in the faction opposing Henry's; the Countess of Pembroke; and the Countess of Kent. The British Library copy also omits the dedications to Arabella Stuart and to the Countesses of Kent, Pembroke, and Suffolk. The Chapin Library copy, presented to Thomas Jones, omits most dedications other than the ones to the Queen, Princess Elizabeth, “All Vertuous Ladies,” the Countess of Cumberland, and the Countess of Dorset.

We see a pattern emerging from this evidence of Lanyer's attempt to appeal to different powerful factions at court—the principal one being Queen Anne and the Essex-Sidney family—omitting the appropriate dedications as necessary. Moreover, it appears that the factions themselves are continually shifting, making the writing of dedications a hazardous undertaking. Anne Clifford notes in her diary the shifting hierarchy at court: at first, “my Lady of Bedford [Lucy] was so great a woman with the Queen as everybody much respected her,” while later “Now was my Lady [Penelope] Rich grown great with the Queen, in so much as my Lady of Bedford was something out with her.”¹⁸ In her attempt to procure patronage, Lanyer casts her net wide but is careful to observe court politics for the shifting alliances of female friendship and in some cases of outright rivalry.

A recent essay by Catherine Keohane departs from the prevailing critical model of a unified female community to suggest that the sense of community in Lanyer is “threatened by the special relationship she [Lanyer] establishes between the Countess of Cumberland and Christ.” Keohane points to the “shift from the first person plural in the blazon of the risen Christ (1305-20, …) to the singular internalizing of Christ within the Countess of Cumberland's heart.”¹⁹ Although Cumberland is Lanyer's main addressee, what Keohane identifies as the internalizing of Christ is not unique to Cumberland. Lanyer uses that image of Christ within the woman's breast in two dedications. In the one to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, Lanyer imagines a personified Virtue opening the “closet of your [Lucy's] lovely breast” ([Salve Deus Rex Judæorum; hereafter referred to as SD,] SD, 32.2) in order “To let him [Christ] in, by whom her [Virtue's] youth was blest / The true-love of your soule, your hearts delight” (SD, 32.5-6). And to Anne Clifford, Lanyer urges her, “Yet lodge him [Christ] in the closet of your heart, / Whose worth is more than can be shew'd by Art” (SD, 47.143-44). Lanyer, I contend, is doing something similar to Donne in his Holy Sonnet “Show me deare Christ”:

Betray kind husband thy spouse to our sights,
And let myne amorous soule court thy mild Dove,
Who is most trew, and pleasing to thee, then
When she'is embrac'd and open to most men.(20)

While Donne figures the church as a whore circulating among men, Lanyer panders Christ to multiple patrons. In his reading of another dedication—the one to Lucy, Countess of Bedford—Jonathan Goldberg argues that Lanyer “sexualizes the scene of Virtue's entrance” into Lucy's breast, and sees the penetration as a same-sex encounter and Christ as a dildo.²¹ Goldberg's emphasis on female-female sexuality and his suggestion of the “possibility that female service of a patron could involve sexual services” are much-needed correctives to readings that view Lanyer's relations with her female patrons simply as based on female solidarity.²² Rather, those relations are highly contentious and fraught with issues of class and sexuality. My own reading of Lanyer finds that the seeming intimacy of the relationship between Christ and Lanyer's patron—an intimacy and a relationship arranged by Lanyer, we must not forget—is betrayed by the many restagings of the scene of Christ within the breasts of various female patrons.

Apart from the evidence of a possibly perilous manipulation of multiple dedications, there are enough moments of textual instability in the poem to suggest that the praise of women is a complicated business for Lanyer. Lanyer, as Elaine Beilin says, undertakes “to circumvent masculine thinking and writing about women,” but I argue that the attempt at circumventing patriarchy is full of pitfalls partly because of the difficulty of countering stereotypes of the wicked woman.²³

Like Chaucer in The Legend of Good Women, Lanyer very curiously introduces Cleopatra in a poem that ostensibly sets out to praise good women. Granted, these stanzas are part of a sequence sub-headed “An Invective against outward beuty unaccompanied with virtue” (SD, 59). But Lanyer ameliorates the depictions of women traditionally viewed as evil by stressing the plight of the woman. She only gently chides Cleopatra, emphasizing Cleopatra's loss of honor and neglecting to mention Antony's downfall:

Beautie the cause Antonius wrong'd his wife,
Which could not be decided but by sword:
          Great Cleopatraes Beautie and defects
          Did worke Octaviaes wrongs, and his neglects.
What fruit did yeeld that faire forbidden tree,
But blood, dishonour, infamie, and shame?
Poore blinded Queene, could'st thou no better see,
But entertaine disgrace, in stead of fame?
Doe these designes with Majestie agree?
To staine thy blood, and blot thy royall name.
          That heart that gave consent unto this ill,
          Did give consent that thou thy selfe should'st kill.

(SD, 60.213-24)

Lanyer distances Cleopatra from the wrong done to Octavia by making Antony the direct actor and Cleopatra only a secondary cause. This distancing is also accomplished by the syntax, which separates Cleopatra's self from her beauty and which makes the latter the agent. The reference to the “forbidden tree” of course harks back to Eve, whom Lanyer would later redeem in the section on “Eves Apologie” by arguing that Eve was deceived by the serpent and in “Giving to Adam what shee held most deare, / Was simply good, and had no powre to see” (SD, 84.764-65). Lanyer goes on to insist that Adam, moreover, “can not be excusde, / Her fault though great, yet hee was most too blame; / What Weaknesse offered, Strength might have refused” (SD, 85.777-79). Lanyer vindicates Cleopatra, as she does Eve, by claiming that her flaw is the lack of true sight and not intentional malignancy, using the very terms of patriarchy that define women as congenitally inferior in order to subvert them.

Lanyer goes even further to suggest that female weakness that men criticize is constitutive of the very thing of which men are proudest, conflating the forbidden fruit with book learning, from which women are barred: “Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke / From Eves faire hand, as from a learned Booke” (SD, 86.807-8). It is in the dedication, “To the Vertuous Reader,” the only part of the work addressed to male readers, that Lanyer is most thoroughly feminist, cautioning the male reader not to imitate men who forget that “they were borne of women, nourished of women, and that if it were not by the means of women, they would be quite extinguished out of the world” (SD, 48) and pointing out that Christ himself

without the assistance of man … [was] begotten of a woman, borne of a woman, nourished of a woman, obedient to a woman; and that he healed woman, pardoned woman, comforted woman: 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 a woman to declare his most glorious resurrection to the rest of his Disciples.

(SD, 49-50)

Reversing Biblical tradition that has the woman created from the man's rib-bone, Lanyer makes woman the origin of man and, more importantly, the genesis of his salvation. But as Ann Baynes Coiro points out, we must not forget the context of this praise of women and blame of men: “She [Lanyer] is praising women in her ‘little booke’ because she says women have been defamed as defamers of women.”²⁴ I want to emphasize again that Lanyer is almost painfully cognizant of the rivalry among women. In “To the Vertuous Reader,” Lanyer writes, “Often have I heard, that it is the property of some women, not only to emulate the virtues and perfection of the rest, but also by all their powers of ill speaking, to ecclipse the brightnes of their deserved fame” (SD, 48). I read these lines not only as referring to Lanyer herself as victim of slander, as Coiro suggests, but also as containing, if not restraining entirely, the competition among her potential women patrons.

Another pattern that undercuts Lanyer's celebration of women is her tendency to recall notorious names like Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, and, most of all, Eve in her defenses of women; Lanyer may have been compelled to do so because being able to prove that these women are not guilty as men claim them to be would exonerate the entire sex.²⁵ By including these women, Lanyer has allowed the competing patriarchal discourse voice in her poem—a discourse which threatens to disrupt her female community, even if only because of the sheer weight of the tradition which has claimed, in addition, that a virtuous woman, Octavia, has suffered the consequences of Cleopatra's moral blindness. Much later in the poem, Lanyer herself engages in castigating Cleopatra, who “left her Love in his extremitie” (SD, 111.1411) and calls her a “blacke Egyptian” (SD, 112.1431).

Lanyer seems to have finally caved in to the pressures of patriarchy when she concludes her poem with a list of male martyrs (SD, 125-28.1745-1824)—a strange tactic if indeed she means to defend women. Ironically, when addressing the Countess of Cumberland directly in the last two stanzas, Lanyer tells her to “take a view of those, / Whose worthy steps you doe desire to tread” (SD, 128.1825-26), and the antecedent for the word “those” are the men. Apparently, in the end, the standard for virtuous behavior is still man, despite Lanyer's heroic efforts to praise women throughout the poem. Even in the dedication to Katherine, Countess of Suffolk, Lanyer's praise of Suffolk turns, however briefly, to a praise of the Countess's husband:

Whose beautie, wisedome, children, high estate,
Doe all concurre to make you [the countess] fortunate.
But chiefly your most honorable Lord,
Whose noble virtues Fame can ne'r forget.

(SD, 37.23-26)

The reference to the Countess of Suffolk's husband, Lord Admiral Thomas Howard, should force us to recognize that the network of patronage into which Lanyer attempts to enter is a male/female one. Even Margaret Clifford, the woman most praised in Salve Deus, presented her copy to Prince Henry—dear son to Queen Anne—in what was probably an effort to aid Lanyer. There is other evidence that Lanyer does not direct her poem solely to women. Betty Travitsky observes that the prose letter “To the Vertuous Reader” was not included in the first issue of Salve Deus but appears in the first edition, second issue.²⁶ Given the flagrantly feminist rhetoric of “To the Vertuous Reader” and the potential provocation it offers, we may speculate on the possibility that Lanyer was appealing to two markets, reissuing her poem for a specifically female audience but taking care not to disturb male sensitivities too brazenly the first time.

Understanding the male component of her intended audience will allow us to make better sense out of these elements that seem to contradict what we recognize as feminism in Lanyer. A closer look at the ways in which Lanyer defines female virtue also reveals how she, while often adept in subverting patriarchal discourse about women, at times becomes enmeshed in it. Her definition of female virtue sometimes comes very close to that of the dominant patriarchy. While Cleopatra and Eve are excused, as I have discussed above, on grounds of female weakness, in Cleopatra's case the problem is not simply her failure to see properly. Being seen is another factor in her fall. Although the section in which we find Cleopatra's story is titled “An Invective against outward beuty unaccompanied with virtue,” Lanyer curiously includes two lines on Lucrece (between the stories of Helen of Troy and of Cleopatra): “Twas Beautie made chaste Lucrece loose her life, / For which prowd Tarquins fact was so abhorr'd” (SD, 60.211-12). Cleopatra's story is then quickly followed first by the story of Henry H's mistress Rosamund, but next by the story of “Holy Matilda” pursued by the “Lustfull King John.” In these intermingling stories of virtuous women, the invective turns against beauty itself, not the absence of virtue.

Lanyer delineates this notion of the treachery of physical beauty—one that is the staple of patriarchal discourse—in her praise of the Countess of Cumberland:

That outward Beautie which the world commends,
Is not the subject I will write upon,
Whose date expir'd, that tyrant Time soone ends;
Those gawdie colours soone are spent and gone:
But those faire Virtues which on thee [Cumberland] attends
Are alwaies fresh, they never are but one:
          They make thy Beautie fairer to behold,
          Than was that Queenes for whom prowd Troy was sold.

(SD, 59.185-92)

But Lanyer manages again to turn patriarchal handicap to good advantage. Aware that all too often the male poetic tradition praises women only for their “outward Beautie” by blazoning the female body, Lanyer makes inner virtue the subject of her poem and explicitly disavows the external body that the traditional blazon celebrates:

As for those matchlesse colours Red and White,
Or perfit features in a fading face,
Or due proportion pleasing to the sight;
All these doe draw but dangers and disgrace:
A mind enrich'd with Virtue, shines more bright,
Addes everlasting Beauty, gives true grace.

(SD, 59.193-98)

Lanyer invokes the Petrarchan conventions of beauty—for instance, the clichéd red and white colors—in order to refute their validity. The outside is only a deceptive gloss. As a poem in praise of women, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum would seem to take an anti-blazon stance.

When Lanyer employs the blazon in her poem, it is applied selectively to the body of Christ. As Wendy Wall points out, Lanyer reverses “the dynamics of the blazon—female dissecting male—but also deconstructs its relationship between subject and object … so that the eroticized Other, Christ, also occupies the same position of powerlessness as the speaker.”²⁷ Another kind of reversal also occurs with Christ's body. Instead of praising conventional beauty, Lanyer praises Christ's wounds, making art out of them:

His eyes with teares, his body full of wounds,
Death last of paines his sorrows all confounds.
His joynts dis-joynted, and his legges hang downe,
His alabaster breast, his bloody side,
His members torne, and on his head a Crowne
Of sharpest Thorns, to satisfie for pride:
Anguish and Paine doe all his Sences drowne,
While they his holy garments do divide:
          His bowells drie, his heart full fraught with griefe,
          Crying to him that yeelds him no relief.

(SD, 101.159-68)

Lanyer makes literal the fragmentation that critics such as Diane Vickers have argued the blazon conventionally inflicts on the female body.²⁸ Dwelling on Christ's body, Lanyer renders dismemberment concrete in a way that her poetry avoids in the case of the women. The Petrarchan colors are not simply rejected but are given new spiritual meaning in the whiteness of Christ's exposed breast and the redness of his spilled blood—the body and the blood that make up the sacrament of the Eucharist.

Lanyer's crucial reconceptualization of the blazon, however, is not achieved through her presentation of Christ's body but through the direction of the women's gaze. Most obviously, as Wendy Wall has shown, women are now subjects gazing on Christ the object. More interesting to my mind, however, is that women are also enjoined to gaze on themselves. The language of the third dedicatory poem, titled “To all vertuous Ladies in generall,” is probably closest to a conventional blazon of women's beauty. The female body is given presence by its adornments:

Let all your roabes be purple scarlet white,
Those perfit colours purest Virtue wore,
Come deckt with Lilies that did so delight
To be preferr'd in Beauty.

(SD, 12.15-18)

This language hardly comes near the possibilities for making the body visible. The description remains austere because Lanyer is still concerned with the inner soul. But she reveals the inner soul through a bodily metaphor. Lanyer imagines her book as a mirror and calls virtuous ladies to join the personification of Virtue, whom she imagines preening before her book/mirror:

Each blessed Lady that in Virtue spends
Your pretious time to beautifie your soules;
Come wait on hir whom winged Fame attends
And in her hand the Booke where she inroules
Those high deserts that Majestie commends:
          Let this faire Queene not unattended bee,
          When in my Glasse she daines her selfe to see.

(SD, 12.1-7)

This moment is an oddly communal narcissism, seeming to sanction a self-congratulatory attitude. Indeed, the entire Salve Deus Rex Judæorum often appears to construct a weird sort of visuality. Lanyer's poem can be classified in a didactic mirror tradition, giving either positive or negative exempla for the edification of readers, but her imagined community of readers are the very ones mirrored in the book. The gaze ends up being circular.²⁹

What then is the relation between seeing and being seen, between subject and object? The mirroring and the idealizing of her patrons is Lanyer's method of praising them. Lanyer's flattery, however, is also coercive. She often directs the gaze of the women she praises, as for instance, when she tells them to look at the body of Christ or to join personified Virtue before the mirror. While there is a visual economy here that posits women as lookers—and (the male) Christ as object of the look, there is also another economy that invites women to look at themselves. In the dedicatory letter to Margaret, Countess Dowager of Cumberland, for example, Lanyer writes that her book is the “mirrour of your most worthy minde,” a mirror, we remember, that Lanyer hopes “will be perused at convenient times” by Margaret (SD, 35). Virtue is partly defined as being worthy to be mirrored, being worthy to be seen; but it is also defined as the result of properly directing one's gaze onto worthy objects. Lanyer is far from praising freely.

The tension in the Salve Deus poet's relationship with her would-be patrons partly arises from the attention that she calls to class differences and her insistence on the pricelessness of her poem despite her material poverty. In the same dedication to Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, Lanyer begins her address thus:

Right Honourable and Excellent Lady, I may say with Saint Peter, Silver nor gold have I none, but such as I have, that give I you: for having neither rich pearles of India, nor fine gold of Arabia, nor diamonds of inestimable value; neither those rich treasures, Arramaticall Gums, incense, and sweet odours, which were presented by those Kingly Philosophers to the babe Jesus I present unto you even our Lord Jesus himselfe, whose infinit value is not to be comprehended within the weake imagination or wit of man: and as Saint Peter gave health to the body, so I deliver you the health of the soule; which is this most pretious pearle of all perfection, this rich diamond of devotion, this perfect gold growing in the veines of that excellent earth of the most blessed Paradice, wherein our second Adam had his restlesse habitation.

(SD, 34)

Lanyer first compares herself with Saint Peter, but then claims that she exceeds even him, for while Peter only offers bodily health she presents Margaret the “health of the soule.” She outdoes the three magi by bringing not merely expensive gifts but the invaluable one of salvation. Indeed, Lanyer uses the common trope of oriental riches to emphasize her crucial difference from other clients. The presentation of gifts—the exchange of gift for favors—of course, is the usual method of establishing a patron-client relationship.³⁰ In Lanyer's description, it is also one that the magi enact with their gifts for the infant Jesus, a point made clear when Lanyer notes the parallel between their relationship to Christ and hers to Margaret. Here again, patronage is figured in terms of religious devotion. But the detail that Lanyer gives to the wealth that she appears to repudiate suggests a longing for what she does not have. In moments like this and those in which she boldly argues, “Greatnesse is no sure frame to build upon, / No worldly treasure can assure that place; / God makes both even, the Cottage with the Throne” (SD, 42.17-19), we encounter a more defiant side of Lanyer.

I am largely in agreement with Lisa Schnell, who detects a criticism of class privilege in Lanyer's poetry. Schnell challenges feminist criticism that posits a false singularity in women's experience in order to create an equally false unified female community—the latter, as I have said, a creation often assumed in Lanyer criticism. Focusing exclusively on the country-house “Cooke-ham” poem, Schnell argues that “Lanyer has written not an encomium to but an indictment of the myth of aristocratic generosity and fairness.”³¹ But there is danger in going too far with this reading, even if Lanyer is concerned with improving her social station. While other critics may err on the positive side by overemphasizing Lanyer's feminism, Schnell's argument privileges the other extreme. Lanyer is not the first to criticize the patronage system. Spenser, in his 1591 “Mother Husband's Tale,” writes of the courtier:

Most miserable man, whom wicked fate
Hath brought to court, to sue for had ywist,
That few have found, and many one hath mist;
Full little knowest thou that hast not tried,
What hell it is, in suing long to bide.(32)

And when George Chapman did not receive anything after Prince Henry's death, though he was promised £300 for completing his translations, he lamented: “Homer, no patron found; nor Chapman friend.”³³ These complaints, no matter how bitter, do not mean that the authors were prepared to turn the world upside down, to use Christopher Hill's phrase.³⁴ Instead, Lanyer, like others, tellingly uses an idealized version of the patron-client relationship in order to critique her present circumstances.

Even if we acknowledge the moments of class tension in the “Cooke-ham” poem that Schnell has astutely noted, we cannot dismiss the quite persuasive poetry that describes a paradisiacal landscape where every element—“each plant, each floure, each tree,” even geological formations like “Hills, vales, and woods,”—serves the needs of the countess.³⁵ There is no irony in the depiction of Cooke-ham as a female locus amoenus. Rather, the estate is a space where difference in degree can be circumvented, at least insofar as it provides an opportunity for the great to converse with the low. The problem is not with Cooke-ham nor with the poet's former relationship with the countess. The poet accepts her lower social status and imagines herself occupying a position not too unlike that of the tree—the “senceless creature” ([“The Description of Cooke-ham”; hereafter cited as C,] C, 137.167)—that the countess so loves. Like the landscape, she too tends to the will of the countess—“From whose desires did spring this worke of Grace” (C, 130.12), the very poem we are reading. Lanyer does not imagine equality in her idealized Cooke-ham. It is a well-ordered, hierarchized society depending on the favors of the just, monarch-like countess: the countess is described as “a noble gratefulle minde, Requiting each according to their kind” (C, 136.149-50).

Lanyer's criticism, rather, is of the patron who refuses to fulfill her obligations as patron. In her opening dedication to Queen Anne, Lanyer speaks of a happier time during Elizabeth's reign: “Since great Elizaes favour blest my youth” (SD, 8.110). But this idealizing of Elizabethan patronage has been shown by Michael Brennan to be a common theme in the writings of discontented Stuart authors. For instance, deprived of the office of licenser to the Children of the Queen's Revels when hints of the Essex rebellion were detected in his play Philotas (1605), Samuel Daniel recalls the memory of Elizabeth:

For since that time, our songs could never thrive,
But lain as if forlorn; though in the prime
Of this new raising season, we did strive
To bring the best we could unto the time.(36)

Brennan argues that Elizabeth would have seemed generous in the openly factional court of James I: “Built upon royal favouritism and bolstered by the factious in-fighting of ambitious nobles, the early-Jacobean court patronage system was bound to engender discontent. No matter how miserly Queen Elizabeth had once been considered, she was now remembered as a sovereign whose authority had not been continually compromised by partiality and prodigality.”³⁷ Lawrence Stone has also described a deterioration of kinship and clientage into, what he calls, “affective individualism” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.³⁸ Lanyer's allusion to Elizabeth is not just a means of criticizing the Stuart court by comparing it to an idealized past, but such a use of an idealized past is quite reactionary if we consider the nostalgia that inheres in the poetry employing this strategy.

The poetry of the dedications can be quite forceful in making the point about noblesse oblige. For instance, the poems are strewed with imperatives, which may at times seem commanding, even threatening, when Lanyer puts the weight of scriptural authority behind her lines. She spends a number of stanzas—for instance, in the beginning of Salve Deus Rex Judæorum as she praises the Countess of Cumberland before asking pardon for her transgression—describing the angry God that punishes evil, who “Will raine downe fire and brimstone from above” (SD, 57.138). This digression is, I believe, strategic and fully consonant with the nostalgia that I see elsewhere in her poetry. The image of an angry God reminds Lanyer's audience that patronage of poets is their Christian duty. At other times Lanyer's imperatives sound plaintive, such as when she asks Arabella Stuart to “cast your eyes upon this little Booke” and to “spare one looke” (SD, 17.9, 11).

I do not wish to overstress what I identify as reactionary elements in Lanyer's poetry, but I argue that reactionary nostalgia and the strident feminism and/or class critique work together to direct the reader into a patron-client relationship with the poet. My contention is that it is not only extreme deference that is required to obtain patronage. A little badgering may help too. Other poets are also aware of the effectiveness of audacity: in “The Church-Porch,” Herbert advises, “Towards great persons use respective boldnesse.”³⁹ An analysis of the dedication to Anne Clifford illustrates this point about Lanyer's strategy because it is the one that most fully marshalls an argument that depends on reminding the recipient of her family history of patronage.

Lanyer begins by flattering Anne, not simply calling her fair and virtuous but also offering her the poem itself as the most appropriate repository for her virtue. But then Lanyer's language becomes somewhat peremptory:

If highest thoughts true honor do imbrace,
And holy Wisdom is of them respected:
Then in this Mirrour let your faire eyes looke,
To view your virtues in this blessed Booke.

(SD, 41.5-8)

The conditional statement implies that if indeed Anne loves honor and wisdom she would “grace,” or patronize, Lanyer's book. Indeed, Anne's patronage would prove her possession of “highest thoughts,” the virtue which Lanyer so generously ascribes to her in the opening lines. Having then set up this condition for virtue (that naturally benefits her), Lanyer underscores the lesson by arguing:

All sprang but from one woman and one man,
Then how doth Gentry come to rise and fall?
Or who is he that very rightly can
Distinguish of his birth, or tell at all,
In what meane state his Ancestors have bin,
Before some one of worth did honour win?

(SD, 42-43.36-40)

These are dangerous words if Lanyer is advocating a radical levelling of society, but she is not. Rather, she says that the gentry must continually earn their rank: “to discharge that place to him assign'd: / Gods Stewards must for all the poore provide” (SD, 43.54-55). In these lines patronage is figured as part of one's religious obligations to do charity. Lanyer continues:

To you, as to Gods Steward I doe write
In whom the seeds of virtue have bin sowne,
By your most worthy mother, in whose right,
All her faire parts you challenge as your owne;
If you, sweet Lady, will appeare as bright
As ever creature did that time hath knowne,
          Then weare this Diadem [that is, the poem] I present to thee,
          Which I have fram'd for her Eternitie.

(SD, 43-44.57-64)

According to Lanyer, Anne's patronage would affirm her illustrious genealogy, show that she is her mother's daughter and one of the aristocratic “Gods Steward[s].” By following Lanyer's barely concealed suggestion, Anne secures her place in the world:

So shal you shew from whence you are descended,
And leave to all posterities your fame,
So will your virtues alwaies be commended,
And every one will reverence your name;
So this poore worke of mine shalbe defended
From any scandall that the world can frame:
          And you a glorious Actor will appeare
          Lovely to all, but unto God most deare.

(SD, 44-45.82-88)

Here Lanyer outlines the pattern of mutual benefits that characterizes patronage: the patron receives praise in return for protecting the poet-client. The pressure of Lanyer's repeated “So”s can be felt to be very coercive, particularly when she insists in that last phrase—“but unto God [appear] most deare”—that Anne's salvation depends on her extending patronage to Lanyer. Authorizing her work by claiming divine inspiration, Lanyer says that she is “Blest by our Saviours merit, not my skil” (SD, 41.9), apportioning to herself the role of priest and mediator between Christ and her patrons, even as she modestly acknowledges her lack of skill. Similarly, in her dedication to Queen Anne, Lanyer writes:

And pardon me (faire Queene) though I presume,
To doe that which so many better can;
Not that I Learning to my selfe assume,
Or that I would compare with any man:
But as they are Scholers, and by art do write,
So Nature yeelds my Soule a sad delight.

(SD, 9-10.145-50)

We hear in these lines a tone of reproach, perhaps because the Queen was a patron of men—like Ben Jonson and Henry Lawes—and Lanyer wants to suggest that she could be a patron of women as well. Earlier in the dedication, she reminds the Queen of her gender: “Behold, great Queene, faire Eves Apologie, / Which I have writ in honour of your sexe” (SD, 6.74-75). Lanyer subsequently redefines art by arguing that it has its origin in a feminized “Nature” who would now “grace my barren Muse / And in a Woman all defects excuse” (SD, 10.155-56). Thus, she turns her gender into a source of authority. These feminist assertions, however, are made in the face of a reality, where though the patrons may be both male and female, the poets are all too often male.⁴⁰

Salve Deus is an attempt on Lanyer's part to carve a poetic space for herself; and I mean that very literally, in economic terms, not simply in terms of an agon with predecessors. Lanyer compresses the reflecting and the didactic mirror together so that her book simultaneously reflects the women's virtues and prescribes a way of confirming their virtues that involve the “gracing” of her work. The women must look into her mirror/poem to be virtuous—an act that is clearly a metaphor for patronage. Lanyer further cajoles her dedicatees into extending patronage by a variety of ways, mixing religious language with a nostalgic vision of the past as well as appealing to their shared gender. As clever as this coercion is, the problem of praise in Lanyer stems from the very necessity of patrons established by the book's mirror conceit. Lanyer pleads that they read her book: “Let your faire Virtues in my Glasse be seene” (SD, 7.90). If Salve Deus Rex Judæorum is a mirror, it is useless without women patrons who would condescend to look into it. The worth of her poem depends on her patrons even more so than other didactic works like the popular sixteenth-century compilation, The Mirror for Magistrates (1559-87), if only because of the way Lanyer insists on the identification of the looker and the image in her book.

Notes

1. The first quotation is from Betty Travitsky's introductory comments to the Lanyer section in her anthology The Paradise of Women: Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance (ed. Travitsky, rev. ed. [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1989], 97); the second is from Charlotte Kohler's “Elizabethan Woman of Letters, the extent of her literary activies,” ([Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Virginia, 1936], 388). Travitsky also argues that “As totalities, these poems [Salve Deus and “The Description of Cooke-ham”] are societal rather than religious in purpose” (29). Barbara K. Lewalski in her numerous articles has elaborated on this theme of Lanyer's construction of a “community of good women” though she does not make the sharp distinction between “society” and “religion” that Travitsky makes; see Lewalski, “Of God and Good Women: The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer,” in Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret P. Hannay (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1985), 203-24 and “Imagining Female Community: Aemilia Lanyer's Poems,” in her Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), 213-41. For Lanyer's feminism, see also Janel Mueller's “The Feminist Poetics of Aemilia Lanyer's ‘Salve Deus Rex Judæorum,’” in Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, ed. Lyn Keller and Cristanne Miller (Ann Arbor: The Univ. of Michigan Press, 1994), 208-36.

2. George Herbert, “Submission,” The Temple, in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), lines 5-8. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by line numbers and abbreviated S. The fifteen editions of The Temple in the seventeenth century testify to the great demand for the work. In 1646 Richard Crashaw published Steps to the Temple, in imitation of Herbert.

3. Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 17. For Northampton as patron and issues of patronage, policy, and administrative reform in the Jacobean court, see Peck's Northampton: Patronage and Policy at the Court of James I (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982).

4. Quoted in Peck, Court Patronage, 29.

5. Reported in a letter from the Spanish Ambassador Gondodmar to the Archduke Albert, 2/12 October 161?, quoted in S. R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 10 vols. (London, 1883-84), 3:98.

6. Peck, Court Patronage, 29.

7. Quoted in Michael Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family (London: Routledge, 1988), 3.

8. Susanne Woods has begun to do such work by comparing Lanyer's and Ben Jonson's approaches to authority in the context of the Jacobean patronage system, but disappointingly concludes, in words that echo Barbara Lewalski's theme, that Lanyer “defines a culture of good women” (“Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson: Patronage, Authority, and Gender,” The Ben Jonson Journal 1 [1994]: 26). Lewalski also explores Lanyer's relationship with Margaret and Anne Clifford but only in order to reemphasize female community (“Re-writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer,” The Yearbook of English Studies 21 [1991]: 87-106). For a perspective that emphasizes the context of Lanyer's social class, see Ann Baynes Coiro, “Writing in Service: Sexual Politics and Class Position in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson,” Criticism 35 (1993): 357-76.

9. Although I take issue with Lewalski's reading of Salve Deus as a vision of “a community of good women” (“Imagining Female Community,” 241), I have greatly benefited from her pioneering work on Lanyer—especially regarding the connections among Lanyer's dedicatees—and on early women writers generally.

10. Simon Forman, 2 September 1597 entry in his casebook, Bodleian Manuscript Ashmole 226, f. 201; quoted in Susanne Woods, “Introduction” to The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: “Salve Deus Rex Judæorum” (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), xxi. Salve Deus is hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page and line numbers and abbreviated SD.

11. See Woods, xv-xli. Lewalski has done substantial biographical work on Lanyer in her numerous articles, cited above.

12. Coiro, 365.

13. Lewalski, “Of God and Good Women,” 207 (“a comprehensive”), 268 n. 17 (“Anne”).

14. Lewalski, “Imagining Female Community,” 220.

15. Brennan, 3. For Lok's and Whitney's dedications see Brennan, 4. For the copy Lok prepared for the Archbishop of Canterbury see Brennan, 211 n. 9 and catalogue #16696 in A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, comp., A Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475-1640 (1926), 2nd ed., rev. and enl., ed. W. A. Jackson and F. S. Ferguson (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976-91).

16. Both reproduced in F. B. Williams, Jr., “An index of dedications and commendatory verses,” The Library, 5 ser., 12 (1957), 21. See also Williams's Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses in English Books Before 1641 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1962).

17. See Lewalski, “Appendix B: Presentation Copies of Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judæorum,” in Writing Women, 321-22.

18. The Diary of Lady Anne Clifford (1616-1619), ed. Vita Sackville-West (London: Westminster, 1923), 8, 13.

19. Catherine Keohane, “‘That Blindest Weakenesse Be Not Over-Bold’: Aemilia Lanyer's Radical Unfolding of the Passion,” ELH 64 (1997), 377. Keohane argues for Lanyer's radical feminist revision of the Passion without falling back on the argument for a unified female community.

20. John Donne, “Show me deare Christ,” in The Complete English Poems, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: J. M. Dent, 1985), lines 11-14.

21. Jonathan Goldberg, “Canonizing Aemelia Lanyer,” in his Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997), 31.

22. Goldberg, 37.

23. Elaine Beilin, “The Feminization of Praise: Aemilia Lanyer,” in her Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 207.

24. Coiro, 366.

25. One wicked woman whom Lanyer excludes is Mary Magdalene, despite the fact that she has scriptural authority to rewrite Magdalene as ultimately a good woman. Lanyer does refer to Magdalene, however, in the passage I just quoted—Christ “appeared first to a woman”—though significantly not by name.

26. A Short Title Catalogue, #15227.5, quoted in The Paradise of Women, 248 n. 17.

27. Wendy Wall, “Our Bodies/Our Texts?: Renaissance Women and the Trials of Authorship,” in Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, ed. Carol J. Singley and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1993), 67.

28. For a similar analysis see Diane Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265-79 and “‘The blazon of sweet beauty's best’: Shakespeare's Lucrece,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 95-115.

29. See also Lynette McGrath's “Metaphoric Subversions: Feasts and Mirrors in Amelia Lanier's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” Literature, Interpretation, Theory 3 (1991): 101-13. While McGrath employs Luce Irigaray's theories to emphasize that Lanyer's mirror “provide[s] a true reflection of women” (107) and is a “vehicle of women's self-discovery” (109), invoking in the process a liberatory feminist rhetoric, I interpret the self-viewing in Lanyer in less celebratory terms. For a study on mirror books and mirror metaphors in English literature, see Herbert Grabes's The Mutable Glass: Mirror-imagery in titles and texts of the middle Ages and English Renaissance, trans. Gordon Collier (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982).

30. For a discussion of the patronage system in this period, see Peck's Court Patronage. Peck argues that there was an increasing concern about corruption in the early seventeenth century and that old practices of patron-client exchange were reinterpreted as bribery. This language of corruption allowed for the existence of an oppositional politics and vocabulary to challenge king and court.

31. Lisa Schnell, “‘So Great a Difference Is There in Degree’: Aemilia Lanyer and the Aims of Feminist Criticism,” Modern Language Quarterly 57 (1996): 34.

32. Edmund Spenser, “Mother Hubberd's Tale,” in Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Slincourt (1912; rpt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), lines 892-96.

33. Quoted in J. W. Saunders, The Profession of English Letters (London: Routledge & Paul, 1964), 50-52.

34. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 1975).

35. “Cooke-ham,” in The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, 131.33, 133.68. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page and line numbers and abbreviated C.

36. Samuel Daniel, “To the Prince,” in The Tragedy of Philotas by Samuel Daniel, ed. L. Michel (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1949), lines 83-86.

37. Brennan, 114.

38. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800, abridged edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 22. See also Patricia Thomson, “The Literature of Patronage, 1580-1630,” Essays in Criticism 2 (1952): 267-84 and “The Patronage of Letters under Elizabeth and James I,” English 7 (1949): 278-82.

39. Herbert, “The Church Porch,” The Temple, in The Works, line 253.

40. Woods attributes Jonson's success in gaining patronage and Lanyer's failure to do so to gender politics of a patriarchal patronage system (“Aemilia Lanyer,” 19). See also Robert C. Evans, Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1989). Significantly, the clients of several of Lanyer's women dedicatees, whom Lewalski lists, are all men: “Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke, extended hospitality and patronage at her Wilton estate to many writers (Nicholas Breton, Samuel Daniel, Abraham Fraunce, Gervase Babington, Thomas Moffat) and received dedications from many others (Michael Drayton, Thomas Nashe, Henry Lok, Nathaniel Baxter, Edmund Spenser). The Countess of Bedford was patron and friend to Donne, Daniel, Jonson, and many others” (“Imagining Female Community,” 397 n. 36).