[In the following essay, Woods provides an overview of Lanyer's life and works and analyzes several of her major poems.]

Aemilia Lanyer's life, like the lives of the vast majority of her contemporaries, is mostly shrouded in the indifference of the past. Various public records offer some information, and we know or can reasonably induce more from two additional sources. The astrologer Simon Forman (1552-1611) kept a professional diary and detailed casebooks about the people who came to him for consultation, with Lanyer among those who visited him several times in 1597. Read carefully and critically, these works provide a close glimpse of one period of her life. In addition, Lanyer's poems assert or suggest some autobiographical facts, although these should be seen within the conventions of the volume in which they are printed. Together these materials sketch a portrait of an intelligent, attractive, strong-minded woman whose life on the fringes of Elizabethan and Jacobean court society gave her some opportunity for education and advancement, but whose ambitions outstripped her social class and financial resources. She developed a distinct poetic voice, and may have been the first Englishwoman to publish a full edition of poems and to claim for herself a professional poetic voice, as her male contemporaries (such as Ben Jonson) were just beginning to do.

She was born Aemilia Bassano, the daughter of court musician Baptist Bassano, described in his will as a “native of Venice,” and of Margaret Johnson, his common law wife.¹ Aemilia was christened in the parish church of St. Botolph, Bishopsgate, 27 January 1569,² just outside the London wall near the developing suburb of The Spital, where her father had long-term leases on three houses.³ A detailed map of the area from around 1559 … shows the church next door to a group of houses with a substantial garden, the “Giardin di Piero,” and, next after that, the buildings and gardens of St. Mary of Bethlehem, the notorious “Bedlam.”⁴ Lanyer's older contemporary, John Stow (1525?-1605), describes the area as it was not long after her birth:

The parish church of St. Buttolph without Bishopsgate [is] in a fair churchyard, adjoining to the town ditch, upon the very bank thereof, but of old time inclosed with a comely wall of brick, lately repaired by Sir William Allen, Mayor, in the year 1571, because he was born in that parish, where also he was buried. … Next unto the parish church of St. Buttolph is a fair inn for receipt of travelers; than an hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, founded by Simon Fitz Mary, one of the sheriffs of London, in the year 1246: he founded it to have been a priory of canons … and King Edward III, granted a protection … the 14th year of his reign. It was an hospital for distracted people.⁵

Across from the church, according to Stow, was another “large inn for receipt of travellers, … called the Dolphin, of such a sign,” and up the road is “the late dissolved priory and hospital, commonly called St Mary Spittle.” This large and prosperous property had been taken over by Henry VIII when he dissolved the monasteries (1535-40), and it is possible that Baptist Bassano may have received his leases directly or indirectly from the dissolution. Stow says that in Elizabethan times “in place of this hospital, and near adjoining, are now many fair houses built for receipt and lodging of worshipful persons.” Or it may be that Bassano's houses were among those newly built by the nearby field known as “The Spital.”⁶ The area of Aemilia's birth was therefore an old suburb adjacent to London, newly developing under Elizabethan prosperity.

What may have begun as a life of some privilege had setbacks even before Aemilia's father died on 11 April 1576, when she was seven. According to Forman's records of Lanyer's visit to him on 17 May 1597, she told him that “her father died when she was yonge and he had mis fortune /. and her mother did outlive her father—and the welth of her father failed before he died & he began to be miserable in his estate.”⁷

Bassano's will nonetheless left his daughter a dowry of “one hundreth poundes of lawefull money of England to be paide at her full age of one and twentie yeres or daye of mariage” and the rents and use of the three houses, to be divided with an older sister, Angela Holland, at the death of her mother.⁸ About her sister Angela, by 1576 married to “Joseph Hollande gentleman,” we hear nothing more.⁹

After her father's death Aemilia continued to have access to court circles. The poem dedicated to “the Ladie Susan, Countesse Dowager of Kent” describes Lady Susan as “the Mistris of my youth. / The noble guide of my ungovern'd dayes,” and Lanyer reports to Simon Forman that “she [Lanyer] was brought up on the bankes of Kente.”¹⁰ Access to this noble household was very likely access as well to the education that informs Lanyer's poems, including some familiarity with the classical tradition and with the techniques of rhetoric.

In 1587 Aemilia's mother died,¹¹ by which time or shortly thereafter her eighteen-year-old daughter had come to the attention of another important Tudor aristocrat. Henry Cary, Lord Hunsdon, was then Queen Elizabeth's Lord Chamberlain. Though forty-five years older than Aemilia, he was a prominent courtier and a patron of the arts (including Shakespeare's theater company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men). On three different occasions during her 1597 visits to Forman, Lanyer recalled her life with Hunsdon and lamented her necessary marriage to Alphonso Lanyer, thus suggesting that she continued to long for the glamorous world the Lord Chamberlain had provided:

(May 17): She was pa[ra]mour to my old L. of huns-Dean that was L Chamberline and was maintained in great pride and yt seames that being with child she was for collour maried to a minstrell.

(June 3): [she] hath bin married 4 years / The old Lord Chamberlain kept her longue She was maintained in great pomp … she hath 40£ a yere & was welthy to him that maried her in monie & Jewells.

(September 2): She hath been favored much of her mati [majestie, Queen Elizabeth] and of mani noble men & hath had gret giftes & bin moch made of. and a nobleman that is ded hath Loved her well & kept her and did maintain her longe but her husband hath delte hardly with her and spent and consumed her goods and she is nowe … in debt.¹²

Aemilia's marriage had taken place when she was 23, on 18 October 1592, in another St. Botolph's church, the nearby St. Botolph's, Aldgate, in whose parish several of her father's relatives resided. The contemporary record reads, “Alfonso Lanyer one of the Queenes musitions & Emilia bassano Maryed the 18 Daye of october.”¹³ In early 1593 she had a son, whom she named Henry, presumably after his actual father, the Lord Chamberlain.

Aemilia Lanyer's consultations with Simon Forman began on 13 May 1597. In a short entry he notes an apparently brief visit from “Millia Lanier of 29 [sic] yeares in Longditch at Westmenster,” which reveals that by then she was residing in the City of Westminster, on the far side of the City of London from the parish of her birth.¹⁴ There was in that time a “long ditch” in the northwest area of the smaller city, “so called,” according to Stow, “for that the same almost insulateth the City of Westminster.”¹⁵ The area in which Lanyer lived was near St. James Park, then a royal deer park, and not far from the royal court. …

Lanyer's subsequent visits to Forman offer an interesting glimpse of her life and concerns over several months in 1597, though filtered by Forman's own accounts of increasing interest in her as a possible sexual partner. The closest we come to daily events in her life, Forman's accounts of these visits are worth analyzing in some detail. His notes give us a picture not only of the background information that Lanyer reported, but of the flow of her visits and their effect on one popular figure of the time; Forman's casebooks show him to have been a successful astrologer and consultant on a wide variety of matters to a large number of people from across social classes.

Lanyer returned to Forman on 17 May 1597, four days after her first visit, this time for the full casting of her horoscope. Forman's practice was to record from two to four different client visits on a folio page of his casebook, with four small horoscopes often quartering the page, but on this second visit Lanyer merits a full page, on which Forman casts both her current horoscope and one “for her life past.” She is noted as “Emilia Bassana,” and off to the right he adds “also is Lanier.” She is described as “of 27 yeares [she was 28] 2 [second] filia [daughter] Baptista Bassano et Margarete Johnson.” It is here that Forman records Lanyer's “hard fortune in her youth” and her marriage of convenience to Alphonso.

On 3 June 1597, Lanyer again visited Forman, who this time records specific concerns. She has come, “the wife for the husband,” to inquire “when her husband shall have the suit.” A more personal issue also emerges. “She seams to be with child of 12 daies or 12 weakes moch pain in the left syd.” She is prone to miscarriages. Forman twice records in this entry that “she hath mani fals conceptions,” or unsuccessful pregnancies. On this occasion Aemilia elaborates on her past with the Lord Chamberlain and the relative wealth she brought to Alphonso. Forman also reports that “she hath som thing in her mind she would have don for hir” and that “she can hardly kepe secret / she was very brave in youth. … She hath a sonne his name is henri.”¹⁶ Two weeks later, on 16 June, she arrived at Forman's house again: “Mrs. Lanier for her husband. wh[eth]er he shall com to Any preferment before he com hom Again or no. & how he shall speed … & wh[eth]er he shall com home Again or no.”¹⁷ A later entry in another Forman volume clarifies this earlier one by explaining that Aemilia's “husband was gone to Sea with therle [the Earl] of Essex in hope to be knighted.”¹⁸ Though Alphonso's chances for success remain a continuing concern in her encounters with Forman, on 16 June Aemilia also reports “moch pain in the bottom of the body womb stomacke & hed & [wills?] to vomit.” For her suffering Forman (or possibly someone else) “gave her appothic drink to her purgation.”¹⁹

By her next visit, on 2 September 1597, Aemilia apparently felt better, and Forman seems to have believed that she might be interested in him. It is evident from this entry, and from three September entries in a different volume (Forman's Geomantica, see below), that Forman, who considered himself a ladies' man, finds her attractive. She has come to ask the astrologer “whether she shall be a Ladi. & how she shall speed.” He again records her report of good favor from Queen Elizabeth and happy life with the Lord Chamberlain, adding here that “her husband hath delte hardly with her and spent and consumed her goods and she is nowe very needy and in debte & it seams for Lucrese²⁰ sake wilbe a good fellowe for necessity doth compell.” In a different slant of writing that suggests a later entry, he adds the only recorded statement about her appearance: “She hath a wart or moulle in the pit of the throte or ner yt.”²¹

On this same day Forman casts a horoscope based on Aemilia's questions, and concludes, “She shalbe A Ladie or attain to som further dignitie /. He shall speed well & be knighted hardly [i.e., with difficulty] but shall get lyttle substaunce And the tyme shall com she shall rise too degrees but hardly by this man. but yt seems he will not lyve too yeres after he com home. And yet ther shall som good fortune fall on her in shorte tyme.” Though we have insufficient records to tell whether any of his predictions came to pass, we do know he was wrong on the big issues. Alphonso Lanyer was never knighted. Aemilia never rose socially. And Alphonso survived Forman's two-year death sentence, living until 1613.

The second volume that contains September 1597 entries related to Aemilia Lanyer is Forman's Geomantica, a manuscript textbook and analysis of astrological figures in which he also presents a diary of set pieces of problems and questions his horoscopes are supposed to help answer. An entry for 2 September appears under the page heading “Of digniti and office,” and poses the following case: “A Gentlewoman whose husband was gone to Sea with therle of Essex in hope to be knighted thought ther was Lyttle cause while he should. Demaund in his absence wh[eth]er she shall be a Ladie or noe … 1597 the 2 Septemb.”²² Two charts are cast side by side below this question, the first evidently Alphonso's. Over the second is written “Emilia Lanier.” Under the first Forman concludes, “he was not knighted nor yet worthy thereof.” Under Aemilia's he has added, “she shall not nor was not nor worthi therof.”

Two other entries in the Geomantica portray Forman's efforts to initiate sexual relations. Throughout the diaries, “halek” is the euphemism he uses to indicate the sex act. On 11 September he heads a page with the query, “Beste to doe A thinge or noe,” and poses the following situation: “A certain man longed to see A gentlewoman whom he loved & desired to halek with. and because he could not tell howe to com to her & whether he should be welcom to her or noe, Moved this question wh[eth]er yt were best to send to her to knowe howe she did. and therbi to tri wh[eth]er she wold byd the messaunger byd his mrs round to him or noe. Thinking therby what he myght goodlye bolden therby to see her.”²³

Two charts appear side by side under this entry, the first headed “Lanier,” and the second headed with a date nine days later than the 11 September question, “1597 20 Sept.” followed by the Mars symbol—presumably Forman's own chart. Beneath Lanyer's he has written, “The partie sent his servaunte by who she sente word that if his mr came he should be welcom. & he wente and supped wth her and staid all night. and she was familiar & friendlie to him in all thinges. But only she wold not halek. Yet he tolde all parts of her body wilingly. & kyssed her often but she wold not doe in any wise. Wherupon … he departed friendes.” Under his own chart, he concludes, “yt is not best to do it … she would not … it not / he had great trouble about yt and it confused him.” Forman adds to this in a hand that might be later still, “but not [interdicting?] to com at her Again in haste, but yet they were frendes again afterward but he never obteyned his purpose & she was a hore and delt evill with him after.”

Forman's frustration is evident as he reports that Lanyer was friendly to him, apparently enjoyed his company, let him kiss her, but would not “halek” and “he never obteyned his purpose.” His reaction suggests that he is not interested in friendship on her terms. His calling her a “hore” who “delt evill with him” must be taken in the context of his disappointment. If these visits to Lanyer's home are real, and not part of what may well be Forman's rich fantasy life, then they were troubling encounters that may have continued for at least a short time.

Under another page headed, “Best to doe a thinge or noe,” Forman poses a “Question 1597 the 23 Septem … Best to goe to Laniere todae or noe.” Under his own chart he concludes, “I went not for as I was about to go my [ost?] came & we went presently to elton /. She next daie at after non she sent her maid to me & I went with her to her.” It is difficult to say whether or not this last refers to Lanyer. The horoscope next to Forman's is of another gentlewoman, “Jone Harrington,” with whom he visited “& did Halek” on 29 October 1597.

Forman's last certain reference to Lanyer in 1597 is an undated note following others dated 29 September in his casebook. It says only, “Emilia Lanie the daughter of Baptista & Margaret Bassana.”²⁴ She may have stopped by, but Forman was apparently in no mood to cast her horoscope. Rowse imagines that she came for purposes of sex; one might better imagine that she came for a consultation, but that the sexually rejected Forman did not want to spend time with her.

Rowse has made much of these September entries, seeing in them evidence of Lanyer's loose character and Forman's irresistibility to women. There is, however, nothing in them to suggest Forman ever did manage to “halek” with Lanyer. His casebooks and especially the Geomantica are peppered with accounts of his sexual encounters, about which he is quite explicit except for the curious “halek” euphemism; nevertheless he records about Lanyer only his own hope and disappointment. That disappointment, rather than the success followed by disgust that Rowse unaccountably assumes, may better explain Forman's last reference to Aemilia Lanyer. Just over two years later, on 7 January 1600, Forman casts his own horoscope to try to discover “at 5 pm 7 Jan to know whi Mrs. Laniere sent for me et quid a sequiter / wh[eth]er she Entends Any mor Villani or noe.”²⁵

Aemilia Lanyer fades from view in Forman's life, but not without leaving a strong impression. We learn from Forman that she was ambitious, attractive, and strong minded. She had a wart or mole near the pit of her neck. She was subject to miscarriages, and may have gone to Forman as much for help with this problem as for a prediction of Alphonso's success.

Two slightly later pieces of documentary information record the baptism and burial of Lanyer's daughter, Odillya. She is listed as the daughter of “Alphonso Laniere” in a baptism recorded in December 1598, at St. Margaret's, Westminster—the parish church we would expect for residents of Westminster.²⁶ Forman's record that Aemilia Lanyer had “mani fals conceptions” makes this an important event; in a pregnancy whose inception corresponds with her husband's return from the Essex expedition, she apparently at last was able to carry a child to term. Her book of poems suggests strongly that Lanyer's female identity was important to her, and as far as we know Odillya was her first and only daughter. It seems likely that this birth of a female child after a history of miscarriages had a strong impact on Lanyer's sense of her own continuing identity, and it may even be that her daughter's name derives from combining “ode” with her own name, “Aemilia,” perhaps reflecting her developing identity as a poet. Whatever the reasons, her child's death nine months later was a profound enough experience for Lanyer to have her buried not from the local parish church of St. Margaret's where Odillya had been baptised, but from St. Botolph's Bishopsgate, the church all the way back across the city of London, and back in time from Aemilia's current world. The family church and parish area fade finally from her life after “Odillya Lanyer bur the 6 of Sep,” 1599.²⁷

Between 1600 and the entry of Lanyer's poems into the Stationers' Register on 2 October 1610, Alphonso Lanyer received in 1604 from King James a patent that granted him the income from the weighing of hay and grain, and Aemilia spent some time before 1609 at the royal country house estate, Cookham, with Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, and her daughter, Anne Clifford.²⁸ The patent provided some steady income, while the time spent at Cookham, and Lanyer's conversations with Margaret Clifford, must count as among the most powerful experiences of Lanyer's life, if only through their impetus in creating much of the poetry in the Salve Deus.

“The Description of Cooke-ham” was apparently written sometime between 25 February 1609 when Anne Clifford became Countess of Dorset (her marriage is acknowledged in the poem) and the poem's publication in late 1610. In the first several lines of “Cooke-ham” Lanyer seems to credit her sojourn at that great estate with inspiring her poem on the Passion:

Farewell (sweet Cooke-ham) where I first obtain'd
Grace from that Grace where perfit Grace remain'd;
And where the Muses gave their full consent,
I should have powre the virtuous to content:
Where princely Palace will'd me to indite,
The sacred Storie of the Soules delight.

(lines 1-6)

Lanyer also claims, as she does in the “Salve Deus” poem and in her dedications to the Countess Dowager of Cumberland, that Margaret's direct influence was the efficient cause of Lanyer's godly verse. Whether the references in “Cooke-ham” to the Countess's inspiration are meant to refer to only that poem or additionally to the “Salve Deus,” “Cooke-ham” appears to chronicle, if also to idealize, a time of rich poetic activity.

Yet that time has passed. In the valedictory mood that pervades “The Description of Cooke-ham,” Lanyer urges the Countess to think of the place as a dim and transient earthly image of paradise, and again alludes to Margaret's role as poetic influence:

Yet you (great Lady) Mistris of that Place,
From whose desires did spring this worke of Grace;
Vouchsafe to thinke upon those pleasures past,
As fleeting worldly Joyes that could not last:
Or, as dimme shadowes of celestiall pleasures.

(lines 11-15)

Whenever and for however long Lanyer was at Cookham, she claims in the poem a close and affectionate relationship that has since been disrupted. The social distance between them was very great, as Lanyer acknowledges:

Unconstant Fortune, thou art most too blame,
Who casts us downe into so lowe a frame:
Where our great friends we cannot dayly see,
So great a difference is there in degree.

(lines 103-6)

Although Aemilia's early years around the court, her upbringing in the household of the Countess of Kent, and her time with Lord Hunsdon gave her familiarity with the palatial estates of the great and with the people who were born to them, she is conscious of her marginal relationship to their world. The valedictory to Cookham is also a valediction to the unusual privileges of her youth. The book of poems she produced in response to that farewell manages at one and the same time to embrace her loss in religious terms, to assert a feminist position in response to arbitrary masculine privilege, and to make a bid for restoration of her place, however peripheral, among the great, through the agency of female patrons.

A beautifully printed and bound copy of Salve Deus survives from Prince Henry's library, possibly a gift directly from the Countess of Cumberland, or perhaps reaching the Prince through his master of music and Alphonso's cousin, Nicholas Lanier. Alphonso himself gave a copy as a gift to Thomas Jones, active in Irish politics and Lord Chancellor of Ireland since 1605, whom he probably knew from military service in Ireland.²⁹ Both of these copies omit many of the dedicatory poems. … There is no evidence that these gifts or any of the dedications produced any patronage for the Lanyers.

Alphonso Lanyer's death in 1613 made Aemilia's life more difficult. The hay and grain patent became the subject of litigation between Aemilia and Alphonso's relatives over the next twenty and more years,³⁰ and she was forced to try at least one desperate measure to maintain herself and her now-grown son, who was about twenty when Alphonso died.

In 1617 Aemilia Lanyer founded a school in the wealthy suburb of St. Giles in the Field, which she kept until 1619, but her residence was marred by dispute and litigation with the landlord over rent and building repairs. The dispute came to a head in 1620 when she sued her landlord for the recovery of money spent for repairs and for a stay of his suits against her, and he counter-sued, claiming she had left without paying the last quarter's rent, and with the property in bad repair.³¹

St. Giles in the Field was north and slightly east of Charing Cross in the district of Greater London now known as the Seven Dials. Map C (xlv) shows the area to have been mostly rural, and near the main roads to Uxbridge and Reading to the northwest and west. What Lanyer had sought to rent was a farmhouse without two of its outbuildings, and she accuses the landlord, an attorney named Edward Smith, of setting up a lease he could break when he found a better tenant who would also rent the two outbuildings and whom he deemed more reliable. Through the legal diction of the petition to Chancery Court we perhaps catch a glimpse of her voice:

November 1620 … To the Right Honorable Francis Lorde Verulam Lord Chauncelor of England. In most humble mannor complanynge sheweth unto your good Lordshipp your Lordships Oratrix Emelia Lanier widdow late wife of captayne Alfonsoe Lanyer his ma[jes]ties servante deceased. That the said Oratrix by the death of the said husband beinge left in verry poore estate hee havinge spente a greate parte of his estate in the servinge of the Late Queene in her warres of Ireland and other places she proposes said Oratrix for her maynetaynaunce and releefe was compelled to teach and educate the children of divers persons of worth and understandinge That one Edward Smith of the middle Temple counsellor of the Law was posessed of the lease of a house in St. Giles … which she thought was fitt for the purpose. She repaired unto the said Edward Smith about August 1617 and did agree with him to take a lease of said house with all the appurtenaunces whatsoever except one stable and haylofte belonging.

They made an agreement, according to Lanyer, that rent of £22 per year would be paid quarterly, but the exact timing and method was another subject of dispute. Lanyer complains that the terms of the agreement were deliberately hedged in Smith's favor, though she admits she let him draw them up. Her explanation, if true, adds more complexity to her character: “And because said Edward Smith was a counselor at law and professed much friendshipe and kindenes unto the said Oratrix she was content to referre the drawinge of the said lease unto the said Edward Smith. But contrary to the said trust imposed in him by the said Oratrix [he] would not draw such indenture and lease but did seale and deliver a note in writing which hee tould her was a good lease and such … as was agreed. hee had made the same only for his owne Advantage and contrary to the saide Agreement.” Lanyer then claims that Smith found “a better Tennaunte who would give him more rente and take the stables and haylofte,” and began to harrass her about repairs and the due dates of her rent.

Lanyer's petition concludes by claiming that “said Edward Smith is still indebted to her for the some of ten pounds and upwards for repairs” and requesting “his said Majesties gratious writt of injunction to see directed to the said Edward Smith his councillors attourneyes and solicitors for the staye of all suits of common law” until she can receive a hearing in the chancery court. In his response, Smith acknowledges that he found a better tenant, Sir Edward Morgan, but presses his rent and repair grievances against Aemilia all the same. This dispute, too, fades from view. We have no idea what Lanyer taught during the two years she kept the school, nor whom she taught. The episode shows that she was enterprising and had strength of character, and (as in the disputes over Alphonso's patent) she was not intimidated by the legal system.

The few remaining glimpses of Lanyer's life suggest that she spent her later years with or around her son's family. If they were not wealthy, neither were they poor. Henry Lanyer had joined the family trade and become a court musician, a flautist. He married Joyce Mansfield on 18 August 1623, at the London Church of St. Andrew by the Wardrobe, in the London ward of Baynard's Castle. Henry and Joyce bore a daughter, Mary, christened 25 July 1627, and a son, Henry, christened 16 January 1630, both at St. James, Clerkenwell, in whose parish the family had settled.³² This suburban parish was slightly north and about halfway between St. Giles in the Field and St. Botolph's Bishopsgate, closer to the walls of the City than St. Giles or Westminster had been (see Map D, xlvi). In the early seventeenth century the parish seems to have been reasonably prosperous; it counted Thomas Chaloner, tutor to Prince Henry, among the church vestrymen, and was responsible for maintaining one of the finest fresh water wells in the Greater London area.³³

Henry died in October 1633, at the age of forty. His will was proved in the Archdeaconry Court of London in November, leaving care for his minor children with his wife, Joyce, to whom they were formally granted in 1634.³⁴ Baptista Bassano had been equally careful to make sure the mother of his child had legal custody and responsibility. Aemilia apparently had a role in helping to raise her grandchildren, Mary and Henry; as she continued negotiations and litigations with her in-laws over Alphonso's patent through the 1630's, she did so on behalf of her grandchildren as well as herself.

Aemilia Bassano Lanyer was buried on 3 April 1645, at St. James, Clerkenwell.³⁵ The parish record lists her as a “pensioner,” a term which designated a steady income. Her seventy-six years had seen all of the reign of King James I (1603-25) as well as most of the reigns of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603) and King Charles I (1625-49).

SALVE DEUS REX JUDæORUM

Salve Deus Rex Judæorum's official publication date, 1611, was also the publication year of the King James Bible, John Donne's Anatomy of the World, quartos of three Shakespeare plays, one Jonson play, a reprint of Marlowe's Faustus, Chapman's translation of Homer, and the first collected edition of Edmund Spenser's Works. Lanyer's volume is an attractive quarto printed by Valentine Simmes and sold by Richard Bonian, respectable members of their trades. The book's only acknowledgement of masculine authority is the title page's description of Lanyer as “Wife to Captaine Alfonso Lanyer Servant to the Kings Majestie.” Beyond that, the book is dedicated and addressed only to women, assumes a community of intellectual women, and makes no serious apology for a woman poet publishing her own work.

This unapologetic creation of a community of good women for whom another woman is the spokesperson and commemorator is unusual and possibly unique in early seventeenth-century England. During the sixteenth century Englishwomen found voices through the contradictory injunctions of Protestantism, which on the one hand reasserted the traditional expectation of womanly silence and subservience, but on the other hand affirmed the supremacy of individual conscience, even in women, to whom God could speak directly and, in theory, allow exceptions to the general rule of silence. So the very popular Protestant tract, A Godlie Forme of Householde Government (1598), allows a wife some authority over children and servants but demands full obedience to her husband, to whom she must be “dutifull, faithfull, and loving,” and silent if she disagrees with him.³⁶ Yet women were increasingly free to translate religious works and write of their own religious experience, even to the extent of producing religious verse.³⁷ The certification of her husband's name on the title page, then, gives Lanyer authority to speak outside the household, and her religious topic is not on the surface exceptionable.

Nevertheless the Salve Deus is very different from its predecessors. Although Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, had written in praise of Queen Elizabeth, and a great many male poets had dedicated work to the Queen and such important patronesses as the Countess of Pembroke and Lucy, Countess of Bedford, there is no comparable work of sustained and exclusive dedication to women patrons. Further, the central poem, the “Salve Deus” itself, has no generic predecessor among English women's writing. The first identifiable woman religious poet writing in English was probably Anne Lok (Prowse), who appended a poetic meditation on the fifty-first psalm to her translation (from the French) of Calvin's Sermons upon the Songe that Ezechias made after he had bene sicke (1560).³⁸ The most visible Elizabethan woman poet is certainly the Countess of Pembroke, with her 107 psalms completing the sequence begun by her brother, Sir Philip Sidney. The Countess's complex and sophisticated lyric versions of psalms 44-150 were widely circulated in manuscript and admired by Donne and Jonson, as well as Lanyer (see “The Authors Dream,” 27, lines 117-24). Apart from these English psalm translations, there is one other notable work of religious verse before Lanyer: Elizabeth Melvill, Lady Culros, published Ane Godlie Dreame in Edinburgh in 1606. A dream allegory that breaks the commitment to “translation” that previously had characterized English women's verse, it nonetheless sidesteps the issue of authority by situating the poem in the relationship between God and the individual conscience. By contrast, Lanyer's religious poem claims biblical and historical authority and grants the viewpoint of women as much or greater authenticity as that of men.

The dedicatory poems situate Lanyer among the increasing number of professional poets who sought support through patronage. It was still usual for high-born writers to avoid the self-advertising “stigma of print,” but it was acceptable for middle-class writers to claim attention—and assistance—by blazoning their patrons' virtues in verse. The patronage system was an early step in the professionalization of literature, but its economic impetus received social and intellectual force by claiming to reflect classical models and ideals. The classical epideictic tradition saw the poetry of praise as a means of affirming social and cultural values. Renaissance poets invoked that tradition and used it to valorize their own role as definers of, as well as speakers for, their society.³⁹

It was usual for the lower born poet to acknowledge ritual unworthiness in speaking to social superiors, and to request and at the same time claim the forgiveness that sends the grace of worthiness to the poet from the exalted subject of the verse. By acknowledging social distance, the poet bridges it, and by acknowledging humility, the poet receives the grace of excellence. This is precisely what Lanyer does in her dedicatory verses, though her stance is complicated by her status as a woman as well as a commoner. It leads her to claim a special identity with her dedicatees, and to allow their dignity and high birth to assert the diginity and merit of all women. By collapsing her unworthiness as a woman into the general unworthiness all poets must acknowledge in their dedications to the high born, she renders the happenstance of gender as visible as, and as ultimately inconsequential as, the male poet's happenstance of birth.

The prefatory poems are all dedications, beginning with poems to three royals: Queen Anne, her daughter Princess Elizabeth, and Lady Arbella Stuart (who, as King James's chief rival for the throne, was imprisoned in the Tower of London later that same year). There follow poems to Susan, Countess Dowager of Kent; Mary [Sidney], Countess Dowager of Pembroke; Lucy, Countess of Bedford; a prose dedication to Lanyer's chief patron, Margaret, Countess Dowager of Cumberland; verse again for Katherine, Countess of Suffolk and for Margaret's daughter Anne [Clifford], Countess of Dorset; and finally a prose preface “To the Vertuous Reader.” The “Salve Deus” poem is framed by dedicatory praise of Margaret of Cumberland, and the concluding “Cooke-ham” is written for her and her daughter Anne.

These dedications provide Lanyer's principal authority for publishing her verse. Her central topic, Christ's Passion, provides another authority. If women are not expected to write, they are expected to experience the joy and power of conversion and cannot be enjoined from expressing what God has spoken to them. Lanyer claims that her full conversion to Christ resulted from the influence of her main dedicatee, the Countess Dowager of Cumberland, and that other women, including the Countess Dowager of Kent (in whose household she had resided as an unrepentant young woman), Queen Anne (through her godly example), and the Countess of Pembroke (through her psalms), had godly influences on her.

The title poem on Christ's Passion is a truly original work. For an Englishwoman to write authoritatively on so sacred a subject is unusual in itself, but for her to revise fifteen hundred years of traditional commentary in the process is unheard of. A useful contrast is between Lanyer's “Salve Deus” and Queen Katherine Parr's The Lamentacion of a Sinner (1547). The latter includes some commentary on Biblical texts, arguing a Protestant position on justification by faith among other things, but makes no challenge to the primacy of men.⁴⁰ As one critic has noted, Parr's work can be read as a woman's work more by what it leaves out than what it puts in: “Femininity circumscribes the public domain within Parr's discourse and screens topicality, polemic, and personality from the text.”⁴¹

By contrast, the “Salve Deus” starts with personal references and has a strong polemical thrust, attacking the vanity and blindness of men and justifying women's right to be free of masculine subjugation. Many of the arguments are put in the voice of Pilate's wife, whom the Bible reports as warning her husband to have “nothing to do with that just man,” Jesus (Mat. 27:19). Lanyer expands that brief (and ignored) warning into a lengthy “apologie,” or defense and explanation, for Eve, and moves so seamlessly from the argument back to the narrative that it is difficult to tell where the voice of Pilate's wife is meant to end and the voice of the narrator continue.

The “Salve Deus” begins with a short tribute to the late Queen Elizabeth I and moves to a lengthy and meditative dedication of the work to the Countess Dowager of Cumberland. Lanyer acknowledges that this poem is not “Those praisefull lines of that delightful place, / Which you commaunded me,” presumably the celebration of Cookham, but is instead a praise of Christ's “almightie love,” which comforts the worthy Countess in her unhappiness. The references to unhappiness are presumably to Margaret's alienation from her late husband, George Clifford, third Earl of Cumberland, and the legal battles with his relatives that followed his death in 1605. The Countess championed the claims of her daughter, and Cumberland's only heir, Anne Clifford, but King James and the court bureaucracy were willing only to negotiate cash settlements that were well short of Anne's full legal claim to the various Cumberland lands and titles.⁴² These both Margaret and Anne refused to accept, assuring the alienation and suffering that Lanyer chronicles in this poem and “Cooke-ham.” Lanyer offers Margaret the story of Christ's Passion as a comfort and assurance of God's love in the face of these worldly tribulations.

The version of the Passion Lanyer describes follows closely Matthew 26:30-28:10, the only version which contains the warning of Pilate's wife. She also borrows freely from other gospels, taking references to women wherever they appear. (See Mark 14:26-16:11, Luke 22:39-24:12, and John 18:1-20:18.) The best preparation for reading Lanyer's poem is to read the stories in Matthew and Luke, though Lanyer's version is different from theirs in being uniquely woman-centered throughout, chronicling female virtues and suffering as part of the poet's strategy for comforting and praising the Countess of Cumberland. Within that context, however, the story is a richly imagined version of the most central events of the Christian faith.

The Passion, or suffering, of Jesus Christ refers to the last events of his life and is the story that brings into vivid focus the basic elements of Christian theology, which Lanyer's version assumes throughout. According to that theology, God created humans to enjoy peaceful and productive lives on earth, in harmony with all creation. Humankind (represented by Adam and Eve) in turn pledged obedience to God, symbolized by following the injunction against eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. Disobedience and the fall from God's grace occurred when Satan took the form of a serpent to tempt Eve into eating from the forbidden tree, and she in turn gave the fruit to Adam, who chose to eat it even though he was fully aware of the consequences. Eve's lesser knowledge and Adam's knowing acceptance of disobedience were key points for those Renaissance writers who sought to defend women against the common charge that they were responsible for the fall of humankind.⁴³ Lanyer, in the “Eves Apologie” section (lines 761-832), uses this argument and extends it, concluding that male culpability in the death of Christ far outweighs Eve's tragic misunderstanding: “If one weake woman simply did offend, / This sinne of yours, hath no excuse, nor end” (lines 831-32).

Separation from God became the inherited condition called sin, which in turn prompted people to create a world of misery. Jesus, as the Christ and God incarnate, took on all the sufferings of humanity, canceled original sin by his death, and brought the promise of God's saving grace through his resurrection. According to Christian theology, then, although sin and suffering remain in the world, God in Christ has promised comfort, hope, and eternal life, and at the end of time the world itself will be transformed. Lanyer's repeated references to the Countess of Cumberland's suffering and the comfort she receives from Christ draw upon these theological assumptions.

Lanyer retells the powerful story of Jesus' last night and day, meditating and expanding on the events from a female point of view. The story proper begins at line 329, but Jesus' first action appears in line 333, when he “to Mount Olives went, though sore afraid.” In Renaissance numerology 333 is a figure for the trinitarian God, and a version of the number nine, a number thought to express God's self-contained perfection. Although Lanyer does not appear to work numerology into the poem throughout, as some of her contemporaries apparently did (Spenser's Epithalamion is a famous example), it is possible that her choosing to begin the action at this line is significant.

As the poem proceeds, digressions focusing on women interweave the story. These include “Eves Apologie” (lines 761-832); “The teares of the daughters of Jerusalem” (lines 969-1008); “The sorrow of the virgin Marie” (lines 1009-40); the story of Mary's annunciation and an assertion of her centrality to redemption (lines 1033-1136); and the Countess's piety (lines 1169-70, and throughout). The last third of the poem is a meditation on the relationship between the Christian soul, specifically represented by the Countess, and the crucified and risen Christ.

In lines 1297-1320 Lanyer turns the reader's gaze on the body of the risen Christ, described in the sensuous language of the “Song of Songs,” or Book of Canticles:

His lips like skarlet threeds, yet much more sweet
Than is the sweetest hony dropping dew,
Or hony combes, where all the Bees doe meet;
His lips, like Lillies, dropping downe pure mirrhe,
Whose love, before all worlds we doe preferre.

(lines 1314-16; 1319-20)

The next stanza confirms the Countess as the location for Lanyer's sensuous vision of Christ, and as the ultimate true spouse of that Christ:

                                                                                          in your heart I leave
His perfect picture, where it still shall stand,
          Deepely engraved in that holy shrine,
          Environed with Love and Thoughts divine.

(lines 1325-28)

The last 500 lines of the poem interweave the significance of Christ's redemption with praise for the many virtues, particularly heroic faithfulness, that the Countess embodies. The dedicatory language at the beginning of the poem had catalogued the weaknesses of outward beauty in contrast to the Countess's inner virtue; this last section catalogues Biblical heroines and other symbols of purity and faithfulness and finds the Countess even worthier of praise than they. In the midst of all this, Lanyer asserts her poetic vocation and portrays herself quite literally as born to praise the great Countess:

And knowe, when first into this world I came,
This charge was giv'n me by th'Eternall powres,
Th'everlasting Trophie of thy fame,
To build and decke it with the sweetest flowres
That virtue yeelds.

(lines 1457-61)

The catalogue concludes with an extensive comparison between the Countess and the Queen of Sheba, who sought the wisdom of Solomon. Folded in with the comparison are a vision of the apocalypse (lines 1649-72) and a baroque description of the blood of Christ:

Sweet holy rivers, pure celestiall springs,
Proceeding from the fountaine of our life;
Sweet sugred currents that salvation brings,
Cleare christall streames, purging all sinne and strife,
Faire floods, where soules do bathe their snow-white wings,
Before they flie to true eternall life:
          Sweet Nectar and Ambrosia, food of Saints,
          Which whoso tasteth, never after faints.
This hony dropping dew of holy love,
Sweet milke, wherewith we weaklings are restored.

(lines 1729-38)

Lanyer's extended transformation of the image of Christ's blood is not characteristic of Jacobean poetics, but is an early indicator of a richly sensuous biblical poetics that we usually associate with that later master of baroque religious imagery, Richard Crashaw. While they have little else in common, both poets spent their lives surrounded by music.

The 1610/1 publication of “The Description of Cooke-ham” predates by five years the poem usually cited as founding a tradition of country house poems in seventeenth-century England, Ben Jonson's “To Penshurst.”⁴⁴ Editors usually assume that Jonson's poem was written sometime before late 1612, since a reference to “King James … With his brave sonne, the Prince” (lines 76-77) is generally taken to refer to the King in company with Prince Henry, who died in November of that year.⁴⁵ It is remotely possible that “To Penshurst” was written before “A Description of Cooke-ham,” but Lanyer's work is without question the first in print. Jonson's poem first appeared as the second poem in the “Forrest” section of his Works (1616).

Lanyer's poem shows some evidence that she was aware of country house poems by Horace and Martial, and that she is writing in the Augustan tradition of contrasting an idyllic natural order with a fallen human civilization—themes which Jonson, Thomas Carew, Robert Herrick, and Andrew Marvell variously exploit in their later reflections of classical models.⁴⁶ More to the point, however, is the poem's exploitation of the natural order as a mirror of human feeling, a device firmly grounded in the pastoral tradition and its English representations.⁴⁷ The conclusion of “Cooke-ham” implies that the poem was commissioned by the Countess of Cumberland (“Wherein I have perform'd her noble hest,” line 207), and therefore asserts itself as a professional work in a long-standing tradition of poet as memorializer of great places, persons, and deeds. Cookham's epithet, “that delightfull Place” (line 32), recalls both the classical locus amoenus or “delightful place” and the Christian Eden, both worlds in which the natural order reflects social and spiritual harmony. But the imperfection of the larger world, signified by “fortune” and “occasions,” conspires to send the Countess, Anne, and the poet away from the place and from each other. The poet loses the rich companionship of her social superiors, but in the process she creates a poem that eternizes the place and its former inhabitants, including the poet herself. Despite the poem's melancholy topic, it therefore concludes the volume with an unmistakable claim for the poet's classical role as a participant in the social order she celebrates.

A short prose note “To the doubtfull Reader” provides a coda to the whole volume. In it Lanyer assures us that the volume's title, Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, came to her in a dream “many yeares before I had any intent to write” the story of the Passion of Christ. She considers this dream “a significant token, that I was appointed to performe this Worke.” A generation before Milton, Aemilia Lanyer thus professes herself to be God's poet.

Notes

1. Her father's will, witnessed 3 January 1576, and proved 7 July that same year, professes him to have been “a native of venice and one of the the Musitions of our Sovereigne Ladye the Quenes majestie.” He first provides for his burial, and next leaves “to Emelia Bassany Daughter of the bodie of Margarett Bassany also Margarett Johnson my reputed wieff the some of one hundreth poundes of lawefull money of England to be paide at her full age of one and twentie yeres or daye of mariage whether shall first happen.” He names his wife executrix of the will, directs her in providing the hundred pounds to their daughter, and gives to Margaret the use of the money if his daughter should die before becoming eligible for it (London Public Record Office [hereafter PRO], Prob. 11/58, f. 153). Her mother may have been the Margaret Johnson baptised in 1544 at St. Margaret's, Westminster (International Genealogical Index, published by the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, located at the Greater London History Library; hereafter referred to as IGI, Greater London). All dates in this introduction are new style.

2. The baptismal record is of “Emillia Baptist,” but this is very probably the right person (Parish Register of St. Botolph's Bishopsgate, Guildhall Library 4515/1).

3. Bassano left to his wife and residually to his two daughters “the rentes yssued and proffitte of my three messuages or Tenements with their appurtenances situate and rentes yssued and being in the Parrisshe of St. Bottolphes withoute Bisshopsgate London nere unto the Spittle … and also use and occupation of the said three Tenements” (PRO 11/58 f. 154).

4. All maps are from A Collection of Early Maps of London 1553-1667, intro. John Fisher (Lyme, Kent: Harry Margary, in association with the Guildhall Library, London, 1981), used by permission.

5. John Stow, A Survay of London Conteyning the Originall, Antiquity, Increase, Moderne estate, and description of that City, written in the yeare 1598 … Since by the same Author increased (London, 1603); Everyman ed. (London: J. M. Dent, 1956), 148-49.

6. Stow, 150-51; see Map A.

7. Bodleian Manuscript Ashmole (Hereafter BOD MS Ashmole) 226, f. 95^v. This manuscript contains Forman's casebooks, which have almost daily entries. He also kept a professional textbook/diary, titled Geomantica, with more extensive and less frequent entries (BOD MS Ashmole 354).

8. PRO Prob. 11/58 f. 153-4.

9. Her husband may be the “Joseph Holland, gentleman” mentioned by Stow, 22.

10. “To the Ladie Susan,” lines 1-2; BOD MS Ashmole 226, f. 110^v.

11. Both Baptist Bassano and Margaret Johnson were buried at St. Botolph's, Bishopsgate—he on 11 April 1576, and she on 7 July 1587 (Guildhall Library 4515/1).

12. BOD MS Ashmole 226 ff. 95^v, 110^v, 201.

13. Register General of St. Botolph's Aldgate, 1571-1593, Guildhall Library 9221.

14. BOD MS Ashmole 226 f. 93^v. A. L. Rowse originally misread this entry as a visit from one “William Lanier,” and used that to begin his case that Aemilia was Shakespeare's “Dark Lady” (A. L. Rowse, Shakespeare's Sonnets: The Problems Solved, London, 1973, xxxiv-xliii). He apparently realized his mistake early on, since the next year he pursues his case, but without claiming that she was married to a “William” (Rowse, Simon Forman: Sex and Society in Shakespeare's Age, London, 1974, 96-117). Rowse cites many of the same diary entries I cite in this introduction, but he omits some important references, assumes that Aemilia probably slept with Forman (though Forman never claims so), and makes some errors in transcription. Rowse deserves thanks for directing us to evidence about Lanyer's life, though his work is riddled with errors and was written in distracting service to the thesis that she was the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare's sonnets. From the slimmest evidence—the association with the Lord Chamberlain, Simon Forman's recorded attendance at Shakespearean plays, Lanyer's Italian background and therefore presumably dark complexion—Rowse weaves a romance of the Salve Deus Rex Judæorum as Lanyer's revenge for the 1609 publication of Shakespeare's sonnets. Lanyer may have known Shakespeare, since the world of middle class artistic servants of the crown was not large, but there is no direct evidence, and Rowse's fantasy has tended to obscure Lanyer as a poet.

15. Stow, 403.

16. BOD MS Ashmole 226, f. 95^v, 110^v.

17. BOD MS Ashmole 226, f. 122^v.

18. BOD MS Ashmole 354, f. 246; entry dated 2 Sept. 1597.

19. BOD MS Ashmole 226, f. 122^v.

20. Lucrese: lucre, money. Possibly also a cryptic reference to Lucrece, whose rape by a member of the ruling family caused the downfall of early imperial Rome.

21. BOD MS Ashmole 226, f. 201.

22. BOD MS Ashmole 354, f. 246. See notes 7 and 18, above. I am grateful to Susan Cerasano for generously sharing her transcriptions of several of these Ashmole 354 passages, which in most cases agree with mine. In the few places where we disagree, I have sometimes been persuaded by her reading and sometimes stayed with my own.

23. BOD MS Ashmole 354, f. 250.

24. BOD MS Ashmole 226, f. 222^v.

25. BOD MS Ashmole 236, f. 5.

26. IGI, Greater London.

27. Guildhall Library 4515/1.

28. S P 14 (James I), 9/20; Barbara Lewalski notes that Cookham was a crown manor leased to Margaret's brother, William Russell of Thornhaugh, “and occupied by the Countess of Cumberland at some periods during her estrangement from her husband in the years before his death in 1605, and perhaps just after. Anne Clifford's diary records a visit to Cookham in 1603” (Lewalski, “Imagining Female Community: Aemilia Lanyer's Poems,” Writing Women in Jacobean England, Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993, 212-41, n. 11). She also points out that Anne Clifford's marriage establishes the terminus ad quem for Lanyer's Cookham visit.

29. See Textual Introduction. The Irish connection is cited in Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Verse, ed. Germaine Greer et al. (New York: Noonday, 1989), 45.

30. S P 14 (James I), 75/22; S P 16 (Charles I), 283/57, 327/128, 356/95, 391/81.

31. PRO Chancery Case, C2/ James I L11/64.

32. IGI, Greater London.

33. Greater London Record Office, Miscellaneous Vestry Records from St. James, Clerkenwell, P76.JS.7 140.

34. Guildhall Library 9050/6 (1633 Reg. 6, 134^v; 1634 Reg. 6, 145).

35. A True Register of all the Chr[is]teninges, Mariages, and Burialles in the Parishe of St. James, Clarkenwell, from the yeare of our Lorde God 1551, ed. Robert Hovenden (London: Harleian Soc., 1891), 210 (Henry Lanyer) and 263 (Aemilia Lanyer).

36. Robert Cleaver and John Dod, A Godlie Forme of Householde Government (London, 1598; eight editions to 1630), F3^v-F4, 1612 ed.

37. See Margaret P. Hannay, ed., Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1985), especially Hannay's introduction and the essays by John N. King on Catherine Parr, Elaine V. Beilin on Anne Askew, Carole Levin on Lady Jane Grey, Beth Wynne Fiskin on Mary Sidney's Psalms, and Gary Waller's summary essay, “Struggling into Discourse: The Emergence of Renaissance Women's Writing,” 238-56.

38. There is some dispute over whether the verses are hers, since she claims they were given to her by a “friend,” but most scholars of the work find the style fully compatible with Lok's translation, and the “friend” a common version of the humilitas topos. See Susanne Woods, “The Body Penitent: A 1560 Calvinist Sonnet Sequence,” ANQ 5 (1992): 137-40.

39. Of Lanyer's contemporaries, Ben Jonson was the most audacious in claiming the social role and value of the poet. Among works that offer insight into Jonson's strategies and objectives, see Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983), 17-18 and 120-23; Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1983), 168-72; and Stanley Fish, “Authors-Readers: Jonson's Community of the Same,” in Stephen Greenblatt, ed., Representing the English Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1988), 231-63.

40. See commentary by John King and quotations from Parr in King's “Influence of Catherine Parr,” in Hannay, ed., Silent But for the Word, 50-51, and Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), 72-74.

41. Janel Mueller, “A Tudor Queen Finds Voice: Katherine Parr's Lamentation of a Sinner,” in The Historical Renaissance, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1988), 42.

42. See Barbara Lewalski's summary of this story and Lanyer's relationship to it, in “Rewriting Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer,” The Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991): 87-106.

43. See Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind 1540-1620 (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. Illinois Press, 1984), 39-40, 70, 90, and passim; and Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540-1640 (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. Illinois Press, 1985), 7, 13, and passim.

44. G. R. Hibbard, “The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 19 (1956): 159-74, outlined the tradition and made the claim for “To Penshurst.” His assumptions have been largely followed by subsequent editors and critics, notably William B. Hunter, The Complete Poetry of Ben Jonson (New York: Doubleday, 1963; rpt. Norton, 1968), 75; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), 27-34; and William A. McClung, The Country House in English Renaissance Poetry (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1977).

45. E.g., Hunter, 80, n. 23, and George Parfitt, ed., Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems (Baltimore: Penguin, 1975), 508.

46. See Barbara K. Lewalski, “The Lady of the Country-House Poem,” in The Fashioning and Functioning of the British Country House, ed. Gervase Jackson-Stops, Gordon J. Schochet, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Elisabeth Blair MacDougall (Studies in the History of Art, no. 25. Hanover and London: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 261-75, for the relation of “Cooke-ham” to its tradition.

47. Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar (1579) is a notable and popular example. As a literate person around Queen Elizabeth's court in the late 1580s and early 1590s, Lanyer very probably knew Spenser's work. The first edition of Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590) includes a dedicatory sonnet to Henry, Lord Hunsdon, presumably written during the time when Aemilia Bassano was Hunsdon's mistress.