[In the following essay, DiPasquale argues that in the poems of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Lanyer questioned the notion that female heterosexual desire implies the willing subjugation of women by men.]

“Let him kisse me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better then wine,” cries the Bride in the Song of Songs (1: 1).¹ In the Christian tradition, her desire for her spouse symbolizes the soul's longing for Christ; and poets of the English Renaissance often adopt her voice to express spiritual yearning. They rarely, however, describe their more secular aspirations in terms of female desire. Instead, the desiring subject is envisioned as a male, while the objects of his philosophical and literary longing are gendered feminine. The neoplatonic ladder of love and the Petrarchan conflation of Laura and the laurel provide the male writer with models that insist upon a continuity between man's sexual desire for woman and his sublimated desire for authority, fame, power, or enlightenment. Such sublimated desire is represented as a force in tension with sexual longing—Petrarch knows that he achieves the lauro largely because his desire for Laura is frustrated—but the sexual goal and the transcendent goal remain closely analogous.²

It is more difficult for Renaissance writers to forge an analogy between female heterosexual desire and heroic aspiration or literary ambition, for religious and literary tradition links woman's sexuality to subjection rather than to authority. God punishes Eve for her part in the Fall by condemning her to painful childbearing and by declaring that “thy desire shalbe subiect to thine husband, and he shall rule ouer thee” (Genesis 3:16). The verse specifically insists that the woman's “desire” (rather than her will, or she herself) “shalbe subiect to [her] husband”; and though “desire” might be taken in a very general sense, the sexual connotations are inescapable in a Christian culture that strongly associates virtue—and particularly female virtue—with the containment or subjugation of sexual desire.³

Thus, when a male poet-persona like Sidney's Astrophil taps the language of female experience in defining his literary aspirations, he assumes the voice of a woman in labor rather than that of a desiring woman; and the couvade dramatizes his feelings of desperation at the inability to write—he feels “great with child to speak, and helpless in [his] throes.”⁴ When a female writer, character, or persona breaks free of such helplessness and subjection, when she speaks openly or writes freely, when she directs herself actively toward any object besides God or a husband, her sublimated desire must be dissociated from female heterosexual desire—as it is in representations of Queen Elizabeth—if it is to be perceived as heroic and virtuous.⁵ Conversely, when a woman character or even an allegorical figure like Spenser's Britomart desires a man, sallying forth in an impassioned and heroic quest for his love, she must be represented as seeking to subject herself to his rule.

Aemilia Lanyer, however, challenges the idea that a woman's sexual desire for a man necessitates or presupposes her consent to his rule. In her 1611 publication Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Lanyer imagines the possibility that a woman's amorous desire for a man might not exclude her from freedom and heroic action. She expresses this possibility in her portrayal of a Biblical woman whose virtue and heroism spring from desire: not only desire for holiness, wisdom, and other transcendent ideals, but erotic desire for a gloriously wise and beautiful man. The woman is the Queen of Sheba, whose desire for Solomon “did worke a strange effect” (l. 1601),⁶ transporting the heroine from her own country into a strange foreign realm and inspiring the female poet to celebrate a vision of heterosexual eroticism untainted by subjugation.

Lanyer's vision of mutuality is limited to a few wonderful stanzas in which she imagines the encounter of Solomon and Sheba, for the poet ultimately cannot present her seventeenth-century audience with a practicable model of liberated female heterosexuality. Within the framework of the patriarchal Jacobean court as she and her readers know it, she must conclude that Jesus, the Bridegroom of Song of Songs, is the only male lover who will not enslave a woman. Indeed, as Achsah Guibbory demonstrates, the Salve Deus ultimately insists upon a radical Christianity in which sexual abstinence and passionate desire for Christ are the only workable alternatives to subjugation.⁷ But for Lanyer, I would argue, the embrace of celibacy is not a rejection of men as objects of desire; it is a rejection of men as predatory lovers (who violently pursue women as the objects of their own desire) and as Pauline husbands (who insist upon ruling their wives).⁸ In short, Lanyer turns away from definitions of male/female relations that proceed from woman's status as the object of man's lust or the subject of his rule. And in doing so, she opens up an alternative definition of heterosexual love as the fulfillment of woman's desire for the perfectly responsive man, the man whose desire for her neither pursues her nor lords it over her, but mirrors and is mirrored by her desire for him.

In seeking new ways to define and celebrate women's desires, Lanyer does not confine herself to the consideration of sexual longing. She is interested in “desire” in the broadest possible terms—as the defining characteristic of a human subject, and as that subject's movement toward a wide range of objects and aspirations.⁹ But a particularly significant aspect of this wide-ranging interest is Lanyer's attempt to portray woman's desire for man as compatible with her desire for freedom and authority; and the context for this approach to female heterosexuality is the poet's argument that man's rule over woman and her desire ended when men committed a sin far greater than that of Eve, the crucifixion of Christ.

Lanyer places this argument in the mouth of Pilate's wife, who seeks to intervene in the Roman governor's judgment of Jesus: “Let not us Women glory in Mens fall, / Who had power given to over-rule us all” (ll. 759-60).¹⁰ This subtly threatening plea concludes a stanza; but in the very next line of the poem, the reader realizes that the stanzas are enjambed, that “Mens fall” is already a fait accompli, and that the voice of Pilate's wife is also that of Lanyer, a Christian woman who recognizes herself as liberated by Christ's death: men “had power given to over-rule us all. // Till now your indiscretion sets us free, / And makes our former fault much lesse appeare” (ll. 760-62). Since Eve's “sinne was small” (l. 818) compared to the crime of condemning Jesus, men must recognize that their reign has come to an end:

Then let us have our Libertie againe,
And challendge to your selves no Sov'raigntie;
You came not in the world without our paine,
Make that a barre against your crueltie;
Your fault beeing greater, why should you disdaine
Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny?

(ll. 825-30)

As Janel Meuller argues, the language of Pilate's wife supports “Lanyer's generic representation of femininity as spiritually superior.”¹¹ But the poet's project extends beyond and below the realm of the spiritual; as Mueller also notes, Lanyer seeks “to find and articulate transformative possibilities in gender relations.”¹² Pilate's wife says nothing about sexual desire, but her insistence that the curse of Genesis 3:16 no longer holds force has far-reaching implications; if woman's “desire” is longer “subiect to [her] husband,” then her sexual desire for man does not preclude her freedom. Lanyer explores this possibility through her poem's positive and negative portraits of well-known female figures: Cleopatra, Lucrece, Helen, Rosamund, Matilda, the Blessed Virgin, Susanna, and the Queen of Sheba. These portrayals suggest that sexual relations between men and women ought to be determined neither by the Petrarchan paradigm of male desire for objectified female beauty nor by the hierarchical order of Christian marriage established in Genesis 3:16, but rather by the free encounter of two desiring subjects, equal in power and beauty.

I. FROM DESIRED TO DESIRING

Near the beginning of the long narrative poem that is the title work of her book, Lanyer defines her theme, specifically asserting that “That outward Beautie which the world commends, / Is not the subject I will write upon” (ll. 185-86). The poet rejects such “Beautie” not only because it is ephemeral, falling victim to the masculine force of “tyrant Time” which “soone ends” it (l. 187), but also because it is, by definition, an object rather than a subject. Defining physical beauty in Petrarchan language as “those matchless colours Red and White” (l. 193), Lanyer insists that the object of the sonneteer's gaze—the “due proportion pleasing to the sight” (l. 195)—is nothing but a target for male lust, “the White whereat [men] aim” (l. 208). Throughout this section of the poem, she condemns not women who act upon their sexual desire for men, but the beauty that makes women, whether chaste or unchaste, the objects and victims of corrupt masculine desire:

Twas Beautie bred in Troy the ten yeares strife,
And carried Hellen from her lawfull Lord;
Twas Beautie made chaste Lucrece loose her life,
For which prowd Tarquins fact was so abhorr'd:

(ll. 209-12)

Helen of Troy and Lucrece, two characters known in Lanyer's time partly through Shakespeare's portrayals of them as venal courtesan and chaste matron, have nothing in common except the fact that both were possessed of beauty that “bred” men's lust and aggression. In these lines, Helen does nothing, but is passively “carried” away from legal subjugation into the tumult of war; and Lucrece's active choice of suicide as an alternative to ignominy is swallowed up in language that portrays “Beautie” as the malevolent force that “made” the heroine “loose her life.”

Considering the case of another Shakespearian beauty, Cleopatra, Lanyer again condemns not the woman's lustful desire, but female beauty as the object of illicit and violent male desire:

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?

(ll. 213-18)

These lines do allude to some fault in Cleopatra, to her “defects” as well as her beauty; but they define the Egyptian queen as passive rather than active, as an imperfect object of desire rather than as a sinfully desiring subject.¹³ The reference to her as “faire forbidden tree” foreshadows the language of Pilate's wife later in the title poem, when she describes the original sin of Adam as an act arising from desire for a beautiful object: “The fruit beeing faire perswaded him to fall: / … / If he would eate it, who had powre to stay him?” (ll. 798, 800). Cleopatra, like the tree of prohibition, is nothing but an inactive target of the uncontrollable male lust for “faire” objects.

And the poet still sympathizes with her fellow-woman. Even as she castigates Cleopatra for submitting to the role of desired object, her language resonates with pity:

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.

(ll. 219-24)

Yielding to male appetite is here tantamount to suicide; the woman who consents to the “ill” of a man's illicit desire has consented to her own destruction.

In Lanyer's accounts of Rosamund and Matilda, the poet further explores the folly of surrendering—for whatever motive—to the objectifying and victimizing force of male desire. Lanyer's contention that “Beautie betraid her thoughts, aloft to clime, / To build strong castles in uncertaine aire” (ll. 227-28) evokes Rosamund's ambition, which provoked her to yield to King Henry's lust. Lanyer's reference to overblown aspirations as “strong castles” built “in uncertaine aire” is no mere cliché, however, for the proverbial phrasing recalls a key feature of Rosamond's story: the palace her lover built to hide her from his wife. As Lanyer sees it, the woman whose ambitions are constructed upon a foundation of masculine lust will find in her “strong castles” no real refuge; having enclosed herself within the role of desired Beauty, she will inevitably be destroyed, for Beauty itself is a traitor within the walls. Knowing this truth, Rosamund's wiser counterpart, Matilda, rejects not only man's lust, but all that it threatens and promises: her “noble minde did scorne the base subjection / Of Feares, or Favours, to impaire her Name” (ll. 243-44). Retaining her status as an active subject, she can joyfully pursue her own desire for “Honour” (l. 246) and salvation, “drink[ing] that poyson with a cheerefull heart, / That could all Heavenly grace to her impart” (ll. 247-48).

Turning to address her patroness and principal addressee, Margaret Clifford, Lanyer asserts that the same “Grace” Matilda found in death “possesse[s]” the Countess's soul (l. 249); addressing Margaret directly, she testifies to her belief that “This Grace doth all imperfect Thoughts controule, / Directing thee to serve thy God aright; / Still reckoning him, the Husband of thy Soule” (ll. 251-53). These lines imply that the choice of God as spouse is an alternative to unchaste desires—modestly referred to as “imperfect Thoughts.” But the prevailing characteristic of the countess is not chastity per se, but agency, active choice. Whereas the human male's gaze is drawn to the passive physical beauty of woman as the object that it both desires and destroys, the divine male is attracted to the Countess's beautiful soul, which is active—selecting its own objects—rather than passive: “most pretious in his glorious sight: / Because the Worlds delights shee doth denie / For him” (ll. 254-56). In addition, the relationship between the Countess's soul and her divine lover makes not her, but him, a victim; for it is he “who for her sake vouchsaf'd to die” (l. 256).

Christ is thus to be preferred over human males not so much for the prima facie reason that he is divine while they are mere mortals, or because spiritual desire is superior to physical desire, but because God incarnate in the male body of Jesus is the best lover, the best object of female desire: spiritual, emotional, and erotic. He is both “The true-love of your soule,” Lanyer tells the Countess of Bedford in one of the volume's prefatory poems, and “your hearts delight” (“To the Ladie Lucie,” l. 6). “Loe here he coms,” she continues, “all stucke with pale deaths arrows” (“To the Ladie Lucie,” l. 12). Lanyer's image eroticizes the crucifixion by eliding Christ's piercing on the cross with the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, often sensuously portrayed in Renaissance painting, and the result is an erotic appeal that reaches beyond any conventional allusion to the Song of Songs: “Vouchsafe to entertaine this dying lover, / The Ocean of true grace, whose streames doe fill / All those with Joy, that can his love recover” (“To the Ladie Lucie,” ll. 16-18). These passionate lines urge the addressee to direct all her erotic desire towards a God incarnate in flesh that is gloriously, specifically male, a God whose freely-flowing blood is the ultimate ejaculation.

Wendy Wall argues, in light of Leo Steinberg's study of the sexuality of Christ in Renaissance art, that “Lanyer's portrayal of Christ as a lover and her focus on his body's ‘rare’ and eroticized parts” ought not to be considered sacrilegious, since it proceeds from a “mainstream theology concerned to show that Christ was fully human” and that he was “exempt from genital shame and could master his own (evident) sexual desire.”¹⁴ But the concerns of mainstream theology are not Lanyer's concerns; she eroticizes Christ's body not in order to confirm his humanity and his heroic continence but in order to emphasize the perfect continuity between heterosexual women's sublimated desires (including the “spiritual and textual desire” Wall herself stresses¹⁵) and their sexual desire for the consummate male lover.

It is such a desire that, as Lanyer sees it, led the Blessed Virgin to become the mother of God's son. In the midst of narrating Jesus's Passion, Lanyer pauses to exclaim upon the sorrows of Mary and to pay tribute to her as a woman whose perfect chastity freed her from the sentence of subjugation declared by God in Genesis. Recalling the Annunciation, Lanyer interprets the Virgin's puzzled question to the Angel: “How shall this be, seeing I know not man?” (Luke 1:34):

Thy virgin thoughts did thinke, none could impart
This great good hap, and blessing unto thee;
Farre from desire of any man thou art,
Knowing not one, thou art from all men free:

(ll. 1075-78)

As Elaine Beilin points out, Lanyer's tribute to Mary is reminiscent of Christine de Pisan's; in both poets' works, the Blessed Virgin “appears as the supreme example of a woman empowered by chastity in a male world.”¹⁶ If in Genesis 3:16 it is Eve's “desire” that “shalbe subiect to” Adam, then a woman who is “Farre from desire of any man” is likewise set apart from any subjugation to man. The example of Mary thus seems initially to point away from any hope that a woman's heterosexual desire may be compatible with her freedom.

But Lanyer's phrase “Farre from desire of any man” is ambiguous; it may as easily be taken to mean that Mary has removed herself from being the object of men's desire, as that she has kept herself from desiring men. And the Virgin as Lanyer describes her is no passive receptacle; her chastity is not defined solely in negative terms as sexual abstinence. On the contrary, Lanyer insists that Mary's holiness is manifested in an active longing for a masculine God. The poet calls Mary's question to Gabriel “this thy chaste desire” (l. 1079), realigning the emphasis of Luke's account, in which Mary's acquiescence is paramount, to include a stronger sense of Mary as the subject as well as the object of desire. In Lanyer, the angel must respond to the Virgin's “demand” (l. 1074).

Lanyer has, of course, ample precedent for writing of spiritual longing in the language of female erotic desire; but here, as in the poem to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, she pushes that convention to its limits, blurring the usual emphasis on the precedence and prerogative of the masculine divinity. Bernard of Clairvaux, whose sermons on the Song of Songs are an ardent celebration of the Bride's desire, cautiously tells the monks to whom he preaches that “it is so important for every soul … who is seeking God to realize that He was first in the field, and was seeking you, or ever you began to search for Him. For, if you do not acknowledge this, the great good may become the greatest evil. …”¹⁷ Lanyer, by contrast, portrays the Blessed Virgin as initiating the exchange that leads to her impregnation by the Holy Spirit:

Thy lowly mind, and unstain'd Chastitie
Did pleade for Love at great Jehovaes gate,
Who sending swift-wing'd Gabriel unto thee,
His holy will and pleasure to relate;
          To thee most beauteous Queene of Woman-kind,
          The Angell did unfold his Makers mind.

(ll. 1035-40)

In this passage, the piety of the Blessed Virgin is eroticized as a “plead[ing] for Love,” an expression not only of her willingness to be the object of Divine favor, but also of her status as the “active [subject] of [her] own religious experience.”¹⁸ It is Mary's “mind,” “lowly” though it is (l. 1035), that prompts Jehova to “unfold” his own “mind” through Gabriel's message (l. 1040); and it is Mary's “unstain'd Chastitie”—potentially obedient but not at all silent—that clamors at God's “gate” and prompts him to convey “His holy will and pleasure” to her (ll. 1035-36). When Mary questions him, the Angel must “answere” her “chaste desire” (l. 1079).

The Blessed Virgin of Lanyer's poem is thus, like Spenser's questing Britomart, actively desiring rather than passively receptive. But the analogy between Lanyer's Virgin and Spenser's heroine underscores the enormous challenge Lanyer faces in seeking a definition of heterosexual love that does not entail woman's subjugation. Britomart's sexual desire for Artegall leads her to submit herself to his rule, while the Blessed Virgin escapes such subordination only by submitting to God instead of man, transforming sexual desire into the “chaste desire” of the soul for her Divine spouse.

It is against the backdrop of the actively virtuous yet heaven-directed desire of Mary that Lanyer explores the stories of other Biblical women renowned for their highly-charged encounters with men. In her portrayals of these Old Testament heroines—Susanna and the Queen of Sheba—Lanyer reinterprets the Biblical accounts. In each case, Lanyer reads the heroine's story through the lens of heterosexual desire, considering the heroine's acts as those of a desiring subject whose objects of desire include men. The poet attempts to go beyond the negative definition of the chaste woman as one who does not “know” man sexually and to undertake a more active definition of female virtue and desire.

II. SUSANNA'S FEAR AND LOATHING

In Lanyer's stanzas on the chaste Hebrew wife, Susanna, the poet subtly articulates her challenge to standard definitions of chastity. Though Lanyer spends only five stanzas on “Joachims wife, that faire and constant Dame” (l. 1529), those stanzas are remarkably executed. For Lanyer, the much-admired Susanna is an insufficient exemplar. She finds that the heroine—though praiseworthy—represents a chastity circumscribed by fear and loathing; and Lanyer's ambivalence toward this reactive and timorous virtue contrasts markedly with the mixture of reverence and voyeuristic delight that tradition brings to the Susanna story.

Told in an apocryphal episode appended to the Book of Daniel, the tale of Susanna and the elders was one of the most popular subjects of medieval and Renaissance art and literature. As a type of ideal beauty and chastity and an exemplar of unfailing trust in God, the story's heroine was an ideal subject of romance, lyric, and drama. And since the wicked elders accost the heroine while she is bathing in her garden, the story also provided visual artists with the coveted opportunity to depict a beautiful female nude. As Götz Schmitz explains, however, there was a gradual historical shift in authors' handling of the story. While medieval writers stressed the “titillating Ovidian” elements of the story, post-Reformation versions show “a new seriousness” and portray Susanna in sharp contrast with “the libertinae of the erotic tradition.”¹⁹ Lanyer's seventeenth-century poem taps into the riches of both periods described by Schmitz, combining the strengths of quite disparate medieval and Renaissance analogues. Her account of Susanna is part of a serious, antilibertine encomium to the virtues of a Protestant patroness; but it is touched with a liberating hint of Ovidian comedy, which Lanyer adapts for own purposes.

The poet discusses Susanna near the end of her title poem in a section devoted to the praise of Margaret Clifford. Susanna is the penultimate figure in a catalogue of secular and sacred heroines, all of whom Lanyer declares inferior to the Countess. In Susanna's case, the comparison turns upon the instant when the heroine chooses how to respond to the elders' indecent proposal. In the scriptural account, Susanna responds to her would-be seducers by pointing out that she is trapped in a deadly double bind: “I am in trouble on euerie side: for if I do this thing, it is death vnto me: & if I do it not, I can not escape your hands.”²⁰ Lanyer interprets the heroine's motives cynically, implying that Susanna's choice was, at best, no great feat (since the men were unattractively elderly) and, at worst, an expression of cowardly pragmatism (since death by stoning was the penalty for adultery, and she could not trust the elders to keep quiet about their conquest). By contrast, “No feare of Death, or dread of open shame, / Hinders” Margaret Clifford from consenting to sin (ll. 1561-62); nor is her chastity in any way dependent on the “loathsome age” of potential paramours (l. 1563); for the Countess “could never be so blind, / To entertaine the old or young desires / Of idle Lovers; which the world presents, / Whose base abuses worthy minds prevents” (ll. 1549-52). The phrasing here implies that poor Susanna just might have “entertaine[d] … yong desires” even if she did reject “old” ones; and it suggests that, when compared with the Countess, the Biblical heroine appears negligent or less than “worthy” in her failure to anticipate or “prevent” the problem she encountered.

While such reasoning may seem to blame the victim, Lanyer's message is one of empowerment. The story of Susanna, as the first stanza of the passage stresses, is one in which God's miraculous intervention saves a powerless embodiment of “Innocencie” from unjust “blame” (l. 1533). The child Daniel's successful defense of Susanna illustrates that God may invert the political pyramid, “Making the powrefull judged of the weake” (l. 1536). But such a miracle is superfluous, Lanyer suggests, for the woman who removes herself from the category of “the weake” to embrace a self-empowering definition of chastity.

In downplaying Susanna's courage in facing death and infamy, and insisting that she acted largely out of fear of these things, Lanyer inverts the logic of most traditional readings.²¹ Even more unusual is Lanyer's opinion that, because the would-be seducers were elderly, Susanna's refusal to indulge them is negligible evidence of her chastity. Certainly, many retellings and applications of the story stress the inappropriateness of lustful behavior in old men; the elders are interpreted as negative exempla who typify not only atheism and judicial corruption, but also the medieval and Renaissance view that geriatric lust is a gross absurdity. Susanna's assailants are often portrayed in a mocking spirit reminiscent of medieval fabliaux such as Chaucer's “Merchant's Tale.” Robert Roche's play Eustathia, for example, includes a slapstick moment when the two old lechers trip and fall in their haste to accost the victim.²² But Lanyer is perhaps unique in the way she suggests that their “loathsome age” is a key factor in Susanna's decision.

I have discovered only one other author who elaborates upon the idea, considering that the fair young wife might have found little to tempt her in the persons of the elderly judges. The writer is the medieval monk Alan of Melsa; in his Latin narrative poem on Susanna, written circa 1300, the heroine debates with herself and addresses the issue directly:

Assume that I would want to love, that I would become an adulteress, a disgraceful adulterer is a worse impediment to adultery. Helen burned with love for Paris, but they were of comparably attractive age and comparable beauty. The breathless coughing of old men and the senile eclipse of Venus are burdensome troubles to their own wives. But when it redeems itself with its author, sin burns more happily; it would bring grief for the action, but not for the agent. But why should I consider what a beautiful adulterer would bring and what a disgraceful one would bring, when my love breathes only for my husband?²³

After this extraordinary meditation, however, the heroine goes on to address herself to God, pleading for assistance, and concludes: “lift me, I pray, from the furnace of lust, so that my flesh might not, terrified of death, drag me into sin.” Thus, though Alan of Melsa considers the possibility that Susanna's resistance of temptation is due partly to her assailants' age, he nevertheless ends up underscoring the power of the temptation to adultery and portraying Susanna's decision as a divinely-assisted triumph over what he deems—age of seducers notwithstanding—to be the way of all flesh. As in most versions of the story, moreover, the heroine's resistance to the old men's ultimatum remains an act of courage in the face of death.

Only Lanyer, then, goes so far as to suggest that Susanna's prestige as a heroine is reduced when one considers the age of those who “both at once her chastitie did trie” (l. 1532). Indeed, Lanyer's approach to the story implies that female chastity is not put to the test by what the Wife of Bath referred to as “bacon.”²⁴ In making this puckish suggestion, the poet rejects a purely defensive concept of female chastity as embattled purity and redefines the chaste woman as a desiring subject with a choice of objects. The virtue can be properly defined, Lanyer's poem implies, only by accounting for the reality of female sexual desire and dissociating sexual virtue from wifely subjugation.

The language Lanyer uses in the stanzas comparing Susanna to Margaret Clifford does not, however, do much toward advancing a redefinition of chastity. Indeed, it falls back on imagery of the sort that had long been employed in praise of Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen.²⁵ Lanyer refers directly to the late monarch in the opening stanza of “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” declaring that, in the wake of the Queen's passing, she has determined to address her work to the Countess of Cumberland: “Sith Cynthia is ascended to that rest / … / / To thee great Countesse now I will applie / My Pen …” (ll. 1, 9-10). Thus, when in the Susanna section of the poem, Lanyer seeks to praise the Countess's chastity, she does so in the idealized Petrarchan language central to the Cult of Elizabeth: the Countess resembles “the constant Lawrell, alwayes greene” (l. 1553); like the Queen whose motto was semper eadem, she is “Unalterable by the change of times” (l. 1559). These lines define chastity as integrity; and while they establish the spiritual, intellectual, and psychological autonomy of the chaste female by evoking the memory of Elizabeth as an icon of female power, they stress the Queen's virgin celibacy and the Countess's celibate widowhood, and thus do not explore the possibility of liberty and authority in women with living male partners.

But the majority of Lanyer's dedicatees were women either married or destined to be married, many of them in highly visible unions that served or would serve as ideal patterns or negative exempla for others; and the Salve Deus is meant for these noble wives and wives-to-be as well as for the dowager Countess. Queen Anne was, as Leeds Barroll has demonstrated, a strong and unyielding woman whose resistance to her authoritarian husband helped to define Jacobean court politics.²⁶ Arabella Stuart had married William Seymour in 1610, solidifying what Woods calls her “strong claim to the throne” by choosing as her consort a man “who also had royal blood.”²⁷ Lucy Harrington Russell was the wife of Edward Russell, the Earl of Bedford. The formidable Katherine Knevet Rich Howard married twice, and had sufficient power over her second husband, Thomas Howard, to be found guilty (in 1618) of inciting him to embezzle state funds. The Lady Anne Clifford, daughter of Lanyer's patroness, had married Richard Sackville in 1609 (“To honourable Dorset now espows'd” as Lanyer puts it in “The Description of Cooke-ham,” l. 95). And in 1613, the Princess Elizabeth would marry the Elector Palatine; theirs was the most celebrated wedding of the age, in which, as John Donne puts it, “two Phoenixes” joined “as one glorious flame / Meeting Another.”²⁸ Given this very visibly married and marriageable audience, it is no surprise that Lanyer includes in her poem a celebration of woman's desire for the man who will prove both her equal and her ideal spouse.

III. ROYAL DESIRE

For Lanyer's most fully-realized ideal of unsubjugated female sexual desire in action, one must look to her portrait of a female monarch who did, according to Lanyer's telling of the story, act upon her desire for a man. In pursuing her longing to see and know Solomon, the Queen of Sheba provides an example furnished neither by Elizabeth, Maiden Queen of England, nor the Virgin Mary, the “most beauteous Queene of Womankind” (l. 1039).

The poet discusses the Old Testament heroine in a lengthy passage immediately following the stanzas on Susanna and concluding the section in which the Countess's virtues are measured against those of various heroines: Lanyer's comparative catalogue begins with seven stanzas on Cleopatra, and includes five stanzas on women victorious in battle (the Scythian women who defeated Darius, Deborah, and Judith); next come three stanzas on Esther, the five on Susanna, and finally nineteen comparing the Countess to the Queen of Sheba. It is not only the last and longest of the portraits included in the tribute to the Countess, but it differs markedly from the others.

Each of the other women treated in any detail—Cleopatra, Esther, and Susanna—is, for Lanyer, deficient in courage, unbecomingly subordinate to men, and/or neglectful of other women's rights. The demise of Antony and Cleopatra was, Lanyer feels, God's “revenge for chast Octavia's wrongs / Because shee [Cleopatra] enjoyes what unto her [Octavia] belongs” (ll. 1423-24). But Lanyer's objections to Cleopatra are not merely based in disapproval of adultery; she is also inferior in that she “left her Love in his extremitie, / When greatest need should cause her to combine / Her force with his, to get the Victory” (ll. 1411-13); and though the poet judges her suicide as in some measure heroic—“That glorious part of Death, which last shee plai'd” (l. 1417)—Lanyer's phrasing clearly underscores its theatricality: Lanyer's Cleopatra remains, to the end, more a spectacle for men to gaze on than an active agent of her own desires. Indeed, the poet stresses that the Egyptian queen's death was her concession to a man, the means by which she could “appease the ghost of her deceased Love” (l. 1418) and make up for her failure to aid Antony in battle, which “did prove / Her leaden love unconstant, and afraid” (ll. 1420-21).

While it is no surprise to find the profane and most definitely unchaste Cleopatra criticized by a Christian poet, Lanyer's negative criticisms of Biblical exemplars are less predictable. It is standard practice, of course, for an exegetically-inclined author to judge an Old Testament type as less perfect than his or her New Testament antitype: Jonah emerging from the whale is less glorious than Christ rising from his tomb. Eve—mother of all who live—is inferior to Mary, the second Eve and mother of the Church. But Lanyer clearly has feminist reasons for judging Esther, like Susanna, to be a less-than-satisfactory exemplar. Addressing the Countess and comparing her to Esther, Lanyer says that “Love, not Feare, makes thee to fast and pray” (l. 1521) and that “No kinsman's counsell needs thee to advise” (l. 1522). These lines recall by implication that all of Esther's actions were orchestrated by one man—her Uncle Mordecai—and motivated by terror of another—“wicked Hamon” (l. 1509).

Only the Queen of Sheba, who combines the courageous autonomy of a militant heroine like Judith with a romantic heroine's ardent desire for a worthy lover, receives nearly unqualified praise from Lanyer. In the Christian exegetical tradition, the Queen's journey to Solomon, the difficult questions she asked him, and her awed response to his wisdom all prefigure the faithful's search for and response to Christ—of whom Solomon is a type or foreshadowing.²⁹ Jesus himself is the source for this interpretation of the Queen's visit, for he rebukes the pharisees by saying that “The Quene of the South shall rise in judgment, with the men of this generation, and shall condemne them: for she came from the utmost partes of the earth to heare the wisedome of Salomon, and beholde, a greater then Salomon is here” (Luke 11: 31).

Lanyer interprets Christ's assertion as granting the Queen of Sheba a position of authority on Judgment Day: “that Heathen Queene obtain'd such grace” from Jesus, she explains,

By honouring but the shadow of his Love,
That great Judiciall day to have a place,
Condemning those that doe unfaithfull prove;
Among the haplesse, happie is her case,
That her deere Saviour spake for her behove.

(ll. 1681-86)

Using Christ's endorsement of the Queen as her frame of reference, the poet honors her as an ideal of active desire. Lanyer does maintain that her patroness is superior to the Old Testament heroine in that the Countess seeks and desires Christ himself rather than the type who foreshadowed him; but Lanyer nevertheless portrays the “Ethyopian Queene” (l. 1569) as fully heroic.

In Lanyer's account, the African monarch's journey “To heare the Wisdom” of Solomon (l. 1578) and the “many strange hard questions” she frames for him (l. 1581) are evidence that she, like the Countess as Lanyer describes her in the Susanna stanzas, spends her time wisely on intellectual pursuits. The same phrase—“exercises of the minde”—is used to describe the activities of both Countess and Queen (ll. 1567, 1591).³⁰ Thus, Lanyer might have confined her praises of Sheba to the realm of the spiritual and intellectual, which is precisely what Boccaccio does in his account of the Queen.³¹ But she does not; instead, she uses the Biblical account of a queen who sought out a king to revise the ideal of passive and fearful virtue that operates in the story of Susanna.

In Lanyer's poem, Sheba's journey is a brave adventure motivated by unabashed desire that is physical and emotional as well as intellectual and spiritual:

Spirits affect where they doe sympathize,
Wisdom desires Wisdome to embrace,
Virtue covets her like, and doth devize
How she her friends may entertaine with grace;
Beauty sometime is pleas'd to feed her eyes,
With viewing Beautie in anothers face:
          Both good and bad in this point doe agree,
          That each desireth with his like to be.
And this Desire did worke a strange effect,
To drawe a Queene forth of her native Land,
Not yeelding to the nicenesse and respect
Of woman-kind; shee past both sea and land,
All feare of dangers shee did quite neglect,
Onely to see, to heare, and understand
          That beauty, wisedome, majestie, and glorie,
          That in her heart imprest his perfect storie.

(ll. 1593-1608)

Spirits affect, Wisdom desires, Virtue covets, Beauty is pleas'd to feed her eyes, each desireth, This desire did worke. The language of these stanzas stresses to the point of redundancy the power and comeliness of well-directed female desire. Lanyer includes the hunger for physical, visible beauty as well as the longing for wisdom, and she envisions the meeting of Solomon and Sheba as an “embrace.” In asserting, moreover, that Virtue “doth devize / How she her friends may entertaine with grace,” she invites her noble readers to see in the words “friends” and “grace” not only the innocuous meanings “companions” and “elegance” but the sexually-charged definitions “lovers” and “sexual favor.” Sheba's desire as Lanyer describes it is not exclusively or narrowly sexual; indeed, the line “Onely to see, to heare, and understand” allows a reader (should she “desire” to do so) to interpret the Queen's “Desire” as fully sublimated into a longing for intellectual and spiritual enlightenment. But the association with female sexual desire remains, and it remains positive.

The “storie” of Solomon, his fame as a peerless king, is portrayed in emotionally-and sexually-charged language as penetrating Sheba's inmost being: his “beauty, wisedome, majestie, and glorie, / … in her heart imprest his perfect storie.” But their union is a matter of her egress as well as of his ingress; Sheba's longing for her royal equal “drawe[s]” her “forth” both from the land of Sheba and from the confines of She-Virtue as mere “nicenesse and respect / Of woman-kind.” In the stanzas on Susanna, the very nicest and most helplessly inactive of all the women Lanyer portrays, the poet's attitude is perhaps most subtly expressed through her omission of the heroine's given name. Lanyer declares that Susanna's “virtue [does] deserve to be / Writ by that hand that never purchas'd blame; / In holy Writ, where all the world may see / Her perfit life, and ever honoured name” (ll. 1537-40). But she herself does not record that name, using instead only the title “Joachims wife” (l. 1529). Susanna's chastity is a function, then, of her utterly wifely status. She retains her reputation for chastity precisely insofar as she remains safely confined within her conjugal identity. The Queen of Sheba is—by contrast—remembered for what she did. Though one finds no record of her given name in the Scriptures, Lanyer stresses that she is honored by God in “that her memorable Act should be / Writ by the hand of true Eternitie” (ll. 1687-88; emphasis mine). Her greatness is a function, not of a negatively-defined chastity, a refusal to be tained by illicit sexuality, but rather by the fact that she is the subject, not the object of the verb “desire,” and that she puts her praiseworthy longings into action.

IV. LANYER'S SHEBA IN CONTEXT

Lanyer is but one in a long line—or in several different lines—of writers and storytellers who have been fascinated by the Queen of Sheba and given her a crucial role in their myths and narratives. They have called her by many different names: Bilquis, Nicaula, Nikaulis, Makeda. And they have assigned her any number of different adventures and physical characteristics. In Jewish and Islamic tradition, the Queen is generally portrayed as in some way subordinate to or dependent upon Solomon; in the Moslem versions, the story ends with Solomon's conversion of the Queen to the worship of Allah and his insistence that, as a proper Moslem woman, she must have a husband. In most such accounts, Solomon makes her his own wife, while in others he insists that she marry a man of her own nation. In some renderings, he corrects a flaw in her beauty by inventing a depilatory that removes unsightly hair from her feet or legs.³²

In Renaissance England, the most important application of the Queen of Sheba's story, and the one most relevant to Lanyer's reworking of it, is the use of the legend as a means of flattering royal personages. In Shakespeare's Henry VIII, Cranmer prophesies of the infant Elizabeth Tudor that “Saba was never / More covetous of wisdom and fair virtue / Than this pure soul shall be” (V.iv.23-25).³³ And Milton would praise Queen Christina of Sweden by comparing her to the Queen of Sheba.³⁴ But interestingly enough, the Biblical heroine proved even more useful to English artists seeking to confirm the power of kings. In Hans Holbein's drawing of the Queen's visit to Solomon, for example, “Solomon is squat, stocky, sprawling, and scowling … a thinly disguised portrait of Henry VIII”; Sheba, gesturing towards the tribute she presents to the more powerful male monarch, appears as “a wisely subservient woman.”³⁵

The immediate context for Lanyer's literary portrait of Sheba was the royal court of another pseudo-Solomon. As Graham Parry stresses in his cultural history of the Stuart monarchy, James I greatly encouraged literary, artistic, and political imagery that identified him as the English Solomon, a king of great Wisdom and Learning, and a man of Peace.³⁶ Anyone wishing to find favor with the monarch could be assured of doing so by addressing him as Sheba addressed Solomon. John Donne, for example, uses just such a strategy in his preface to Pseudo-Martyr, a 1610 treatise arguing that Roman Catholics should swear the Oath of Allegiance to James. Donne's preface, like much Jacobean discourse, alludes to the Queen of Sheba only in her capacity as the principal celebrator of Solomon's greatness, in order to stress the depth of James's Solomonic wisdom and declare what a privilege it is to enter into discourse with the monarch.³⁷

Nothing could be further from Lanyer's approach to the story; in her stanzas on Solomon and Sheba, she envisions a love that transcends hierarchy. The King and Queen desire one another as equals, mirror images distinguished only by delightful differentiation in outward form and by the pleasurable tensions of intellectual exchange. This egalitarian conception of heterosexual attraction is reflected in the subtly varied spellings Lanyer uses in the stanzas on Sheba's meeting with Solomon, which begin (ll. 1585-87) with sets of identical words—“here Majestie with Majestie did meete, / Wisdome to Wisdome yeelded true content, / One Beauty did another Beauty greet”—as if to train the reader's eye to seek those identities, and then move to a pattern of slightly varied spellings: “Bounty to Bountie” (l. 1588), “Wisdom desires Wisdome” (l. 1594), “Beauty sometime is pleas'd … / With viewing Beautie” (ll. 1597-98). Such variations in spelling could be the accidental products of a typesetter's erratic practice; but if so, accident has beautifully underscored a vision that is clearly the poet's own: a vision of male/female love in which difference does not imply subjugation, in which sexual differentiation is a font of pleasure rather than a rigid foundation for tyranny.³⁸

It is only when she considers a more traditional version of Sheba's encounter with Solomon—a version in which the Queen surrenders her sovereignty to a fellow creature—that the poet finds occasion to criticize the desiring woman:

… this rare Phoenix of that worne-out age,
This great majesticke Queene …
… to an earthly Prince did then ingage
Her hearts desires, her love, her libertie,
Acting her glorious part upon a Stage
Of weaknesse, frailtie, and infirmity:
          Giving all honour to a Creature, due
          To her Creator, whom shee never knew.

(ll. 1689-96)

This stanza, which concludes Lanyer's description of Sheba, combines Christian concerns with feminist ones: in her love for an “earthly Prince”—her desire for a male—woman risks not only idolatry, but a surrender to “weaknesse” and loss of “her libertie.”

The problem is especially acute, Lanyer's imagery implies, in a culture where female submission to male rule is literally enacted “upon a Stage”—as it was in the court of James I. The group of noblewomen to whom Lanyer addressed her book were frequently called upon to perform in masques that venerated and all but deified “an earthly Prince” who equated monarchy and patriarchy.³⁹ The “Stage / Of weaknesse” on which Sheba acts “her glorious part” is the pageant of sexuality played out in a world where female desire presupposes male rule and both are conflated with sinful idolatry. In such a world, Lanyer's lines suggest, the dignity of female desire is inevitably compromised; and with it, the ideal of mutual love itself. Lanyer envisions an embrace beyond the impositions of power, a love in which male and female meet in mutual “Majestie” (l. 1585), only to ground her portrait of Solomon and Sheba in wary attention to the hierarchies that characterize heterosexual relations in the fallen world generally and in the court of James specifically.⁴⁰

Things being what they are, God is the only king truly worthy of “perfect praises” (l. 1677); and the only truly loving husband is a dead Husband—One whose death consoles all humanity for the troubles caused by the first bad marriage. Lanyer praises the widowed Countess of Cumberland for loving Christ as “the Husband of thy Soule” (l. 253),

… who for her sake vouchsaf'd to die.
And dying made her Dowager of all;
Nay more, Co-heire of that eternall blisse
That Angels lost, and We by Adams fall …

(ll. 256-59)

The idea of the human soul as Jesus's Dowager Queen works a sly and genuinely witty change upon the traditional Bride of Christ image; it conflates the economic independence of a wealthy widow—no longer answerable to any man—with the spiritual liberty of a Christian soul. Lanyer revises Romans 7, which says that the Christian soul is like a woman whose first husband—Sin—has died, delivering her “from the Law” which “bounde” her “in subiection to” him and leaving her free to be married to “an other, even unto him that is raised up from the dead” (Romans 7: 2, 4). For Lanyer, too, Christ is the good spouse; but her Dowager metaphor de-emphasizes his resurrected life in order to stress that the Divine Bridegroom, unlike many a human husband, can be relied upon to leave everything to his wife when he dies. The poet thus portrays Christian liberty and redemption as analogous not so much to a happy second marriage, as to wealthy widowhood. In drawing this analogy, Lanyer no doubt intends to appeal directly to the poem's principal reader, Margaret Clifford; for, though literally a Dowager Countess, Margaret found herself engaged in exhausting legal battles to secure for herself and her daughter certain properties that her late husband had willed away from them before his death.⁴¹

The idea of the soul as Dowager may also have appealed to Lanyer herself; although her husband was still alive (and acknowledged on the title page) when she published her work in 1611, Lanyer portrays the paradoxical strength of her own “weake Wit” (l. 287) and the “few humble Lines” it produced (l. 292) as the “Widowes Myte” (l. 293) of Mark 12:41-44 and Luke 21:1-4. Lanyer, if this reference to the poor woman's coin is any indication, anticipated through the act of authorship the relative “Myte” or power of widowhood. And given what Achsah Guibbory has identified as the radical “rejection of marriage in Salve Deus,” it is no surprise to find evidence that Lanyer's own marriage was not a happy one.⁴² When she visited Simon Foreman for a series of astrological consultations in 1597, Foreman recorded her contention that “her husband hath delte hardly with her and spent and consumed her goods.”⁴³ Aemilia's complaints paint a picture of Alphonso Lanyer as a petty “minstrell”⁴⁴ on whom both she and her wealth have been wasted, a man nearly the exact opposite of the one human husband Lanyer singles out for praise in the Salve Deus, Admiral Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk.

Though in reality neither the Countess of Suffolk nor her husband were particularly admirable individuals, within the context of Lanyer's work, the love and fidelity Howard affords his wife are defined as exemplary: the Countess's husband is the most valuable asset (exceeding her “beautie, wisedome, children, high estate”) of the many that “concurre to make [her] fortunate” (“To the Ladie Katherine,” ll. 23, 24). The Earl, whom Lanyer refers to as “your most honorable Lord” (l. 25) and “your most loyall Spouse” (l. 34), has his priorities in order. A “worthy Love”—his wife, the Countess—is a blessing “more deare to him than all the rest” (ll. 36, 37)—including “Wealth, honour, [and] children” (l. 36). She is the “the loving Hinde and pleasant Roe, / Wife of his youth, in whom his soule is blest, / Fountaine from whence his chiefe delights do flow” (ll. 38-40). These lines draw on the Book of Proverbs, in which the sage advises his son, “Let thy fountaine be blessed, and reioyce with the wife of thy youth. Let her be as the louing hinde and pleasant roe: let her breasts satisfie thee at all times, and delite in her loue continually” (5: 18-19). The wife of a good husband, Lanyer's praise of Howard insists, is neither the object for which he lusts nor the subject over whom he rules, but the cherished “Fountaine” whom he recognizes as the source of all his “delights.” Lanyer thus preserves a place (albeit a small one) even within the essentially antimarital precincts of the 1611 Salve Deus, for a contemporary husband who is a worthy lover.

It would seem from Simon Foreman's diary, moreover, that this concession is the remnant of what was once Lanyer's own active interest in men as objects of desire; fourteen years before the publication of the Salve Deus, Foreman portrays Aemilia as possessed of an appetite for heterosexual pleasures not wholly suppressed by her marital woes. In his accounts of her, she has pleasurable memories of life as the deceased Lord Hunsdon's mistress and mentions her previous life as his “pa[ra]mour” repeatedly.⁴⁵ And when the astrologer himself makes sexual advances toward her, she is happy—as he portrays her—to undertake an adulterous dalliance with him, though determined to restrict it to activities that will not endanger or disempower her. According to the diaries, Foreman sent a messenger to Aemilia in September 1597, to inquire whether he might visit her; and she sent word back by the same servant “that if his mr came he should be welcom. & he wente and supped with 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.”⁴⁶ Lanyer's handling of her tryst with Foreman as he recounts it here seems calculated to ensure her own pleasure while short-circuiting the force of male lust, so tellingly rejected in her poetry as victimizing the women that are its objects. By refusing to “halek”—Foreman's idiosyncratic cuphemism for the act of vaginal intercourse—Lanyer avoids becoming just another sexual conquest, underscores her prerogative to choose what she will and will not do, and avoids pregnancy (which had once already been the occasion of her disempowerment in that it necessitated her transition from a pleasurable life, unbound by any vow of obedience, as a nobleman's beloved “pa[ra]mour,” to a state of deprivation and discontent as the unappreciated wife of a “minstrell”).⁴⁷

Foreman's account of his night with Lanyer may or may not be reliable; but whatever one may make of the biographical snippets he provides, Lanyer's work must be reckoned with. The Salve Deus evokes the liberating dimensions of woman's desire for man even as it addresses the problematic situation of the female heterosexual in a sexist society. And Lanyer's retelling of the Queen of Sheba story dramatizes the possibility that a woman may challenge male rule even as she seeks the love of a man; for the Queen of Sheba poses “many strange hard questions” to the object of her desire (l. 1581), and loves him precisely insofar as he can and will give her some answers.

Notes

1. Quotations from the canonical scriptures are taken from The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1599 edition (Ozark, MO: L. L. Brown Publishing, 1995). The story of Susannah, consigned to the apocrypha in Protestant Bibles, is quoted from The Geneva Bible: Facsimile of the 1560 edition (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1969).

2. For explorations of the ways in which women writers of the European Renaissance adapted the Petrarchan conception of desire to their own use, see Gordon Braden, “Applied Petrarchism: The Loves of Pietro Bembo,” Modern Language Quarterly, 57 (1996), 397-423, and “Gaspara Stampa and the Gender of Petrarchism,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 38 (1996), 115-39.

3. For an overview of the particular association of female sexuality with sinfulness, see Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Knopf, 1976), pp. 57-63.

4. Astrophil and Stella 1, l. 12 in Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), p. 153.

5. See Queen Elizabeth's manipulation of gender images in “To the Troops at Tilbury, 1588” in George R. Rice, The Public Speaking of Queen Elizabeth (New York: AMS Press, 1966), pp. 96-97.

6. Aemilia Lanyer, The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, ed. Susanne Woods (New York, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), p. 119. The phrase, which describes the Queen of Sheba, appears in the volume's title poem. Subsequent quotations from Lanyer's title poem are also cited parenthetically by line number. Quotations from the dedicatory poems and prose pieces that precede it are cited by title and line number.

7. Achsah Guibbory, “The Gospel According to Aemilia: Women and the Sacred in Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” in Sacred and Profane: Secular and Devotional Interplay in Early Modern British Literature, ed. Helen Wilcox, Richard Todd, and Alasdair MacDonald (Amsterdam: VU Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 105-26, esp. pp. 118-19.

8. On Lanyer's resistance to St. Paul's interpretation of Genesis, see Esther Gilman Richey, “‘To Undoe the Booke’: Cornelius Agrippa, Aemilia Lanyer and the Subversion of Pauline Authority,” ELR, 27 (1997), 106-28.

9. See, for example, Lanyer's allusion to the spiritual aspirations of Katherine Knevet as “those sweet desires, / That from your perfect thoughts doe daily spring” (“To the … Countesse of Suffolke,” ll. 103-4) and to her own authorial ambition as a Phaeton-like overreacher that may “perish in [his] own desire” (“Salve Deus,” l. 288).

10. See Janel Mueller on these lines as an “ominous pragmatic warning … based on the status quo of gender politics” (“The Feminist Poetics of Aemilia Lanyer's ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,’” in Feminist Measures: Sounding in Poetry and Theory, ed. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller [Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1994], p. 229.

11. Mueller, p. 229.

12. Mueller, pp. 210-11. See also Lynette McGrath, “‘Let Us Have Our Libertie Againe’: Amelia Lanier's 17th-Century Feminist Voice,” Women's Studies, 20 (1992), 331-48.

13. On Lanyer's poetry as response to the trend toward “evil-doing” female protagonists in poetry and drama by her male contemporaries, see Mueller, pp. 214-15.

14. Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), p. 328, and 327-28, n. 65. Wall cites Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (New York: Pantheon, 1983).

15. Wall, p. 329.

16. Elaine Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), p. 198. See also Mueller, pp. 211-14, and Pamela Joseph Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 55-64.

17. Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard on the Song of Songs: Sermones in Cantica Canticorum, trans. and ed. by a religious of C.S.M.V. (London: A. R. Mowbray and Co., 1952), p. 261.

18. Lynette McGrath applies this phrase to Lanyer's female readers; contemplating the poet's feminized Christ, they are “in effect gazing at themselves, thereby discovering themselves” and becoming “active subjects of their own religious experience” (“Metaphoric Subversions: Feasts and Mirrors in Amelia Lanier's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” LIT, [Literature Interpretation Theory] 3 [1991], 109).

19. Götz Schmitz, The Fall of Women in Early English Narrative Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 156, 160.

20. This is verse 22 in “The Historie of Susanna, which some ioyne to the end of Daniel, and make it the 13. chap.” (Geneva Bible: Facsimile of the 1560 edition, 448^v). All subsequent quotations from “The Historie” are cited parenthetically by the 1560 Geneva Bible verse number.

21. Most interpreters take Susanna's choice as a martyr's courageous willingness to face physical death; the words “if I do this thing, it is death vnto me,” are taken to express physical and moral revulsion at the very thought of adultery or a pious soul's acknowledgment that the wages of sin is death. See E. H. Fellowes, ed. English Madrigal Verse: 1588-1632, 3d ed. rev. and enlgd. by Frederick W. Sternfeld and David Greer (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), pp. 323, 52; Thomas Garter, The Commody of the Moste Vertuous and Godlye Susanna, ed. B. Ifor Evans and W. W. Greg (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1937), fol. Diⁱ; and Robert Greene, A Myrror of Modestie, wherein it appeareth howe the Lorde delivereth the innocent (London: Roger Warde, 1584), fol. Bi^v.

22. Robert Roche, Eustathia or the constancy of Susanna (Oxford: J. Barnes, 1599).

23. Alan of Melsa, “Tractatus Metricus de Susanna” (ll. 259-68), ed. J. H. Mozley, in “Susanna and the Elders: Three Medieval Poems,” Studi Medievali, n.s.3 (1930), 27-52. I am indebted to Gordon Braden for the English translation.

24. In ll. 416-18 of “The Wife of Bath's Prologue,” Alisoun says of her policy toward each of her elderly husbands: “For wynnyng [profit] wolde I al his lust endure, / And make me a feyned appetit; / And yet in bacon hadde I nevere delit” (The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 80.

25. The alarming prospect that Elizabeth would die without issue inspired Spenser's vision of active and nubile chastity in the person of Britomart; but the Queen eschewed that vision—which would ultimately have compromised her sovereignty—in favor of Petrarchan inaccessibility and the socio-erotic prerogative she exercised under the androgynous title of “prince.” See Constance Jordan, “Representing Political Androgyny: More on the Siena Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I,” in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1990), pp. 157-76.

26. Leeds Barroll, “The Court of the First Stuart Queen,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 191-208.

27. Woods (in a footnote to Lanyer's “To the Lady Arabella”), The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, p. 17.

28. John Donne, “An Epithalamion, Or marriage Song on the Lady Elizabeth, and Count Palatine being married on St. Valentines day,” ll. 18, 43-44, in The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross (Garden City: Anchor/Doubleday, 1967), pp. 174-75.

29. See Paul F. Watson, “The Queen of Sheba in Christian Tradition,” in Solomon and Sheba, ed. James B. Pritchard (London: Phaidon, 1974), p. 116.

30. See Lorna Hutson's discussion of Lanyer's Sheba as “an image of woman actively motivated by desire to interpret” (“Why the Lady's Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun,” in Women, Texts and Histories 1575-1760, ed. Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss [London and New York: Routledge, 1992], p. 34). McGrath also notes the special emphasis Lanyer gives to Sheba “as an image of female strength” who “travelled … in pursuit of her own ‘Desire’” (“‘Let Us Have,’” p. 337).

31. See Giovanni Boccaccio, “Nicaula, Queen of Ethiopia,” in Concerning Famous Women, trans. Guido A. Guarino (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 93-94.

32. For more complete accounts of these traditions, and of the Queen of Sheba's status in Ethiopian Christianity and in medieval typology and legend, see James B. Pritchard, ed., Solomon and Sheba (London: Phaidon, 1974), and H. St. John Philby, The Queen of Sheba (London: Quartet Books, 1981).

33. William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 1016.

34. John Milton, Second Defence of The English People, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Vol. 4 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), 605-6.

35. Watson, p. 131. Watson describes the scriptural verses inscribed around the king's throne in the engraving as making “perfect sense as allusions to the political state of England, and the supremacy of the monarch. The traditional interpretation of the Queen of Sheba as the Church would not be an inappropriate reference to Henry's ecclesiastical policy” (p. 131).

36. See Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor'd: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603-42 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981), pp. 21, 24-26, 29-35.

37. John Donne, Pseudo-Martyr: A Facsimile Reproduction (London, 1610; Delmar, NJ: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1971), fol. A3^v.

38. Cf. Richey, pp. 125, on Lanyer's “artful doubling of subject and object” in this passage.

39. In his accession speech to Parliament, James declared that “I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife; I am the Head, and it is my Body” (Political Works of James 1, ed. C. H. McIlwain [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1918], p. 272). See Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983).

40. See Guibbory, “The Gospel According to Aemilia,” pp. 106-8 for a discussion of Lanyer's work in the context of Jacobean patriarchy.

41. George Clifford had willed to his brother portions of his estate that would otherwise have been inherited by his and Margaret's daughter, Anne, Countess of Dorset. See Barbara Lewalski, “Re-Writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer,” The Yearbook of English Studies, 21 (1991), 89-97.

42. Guibbory, p. 119.

43. Quoted in Woods, “Introduction” to The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, p. xviii.

44. This is Foreman's term for Alphonso in a passage quoted by Woods, p. xviii.

45. See the passages quoted by Woods, p. xviii.

46. Quoted in Woods, p. xxii.

47. See the passages quoted by Woods, p. xviii.