SOURCE: McBride, Kari Boyd. “Remembering Orpheus in the Poems of Aemilia Lanyer.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 38, no. 1 (winter 1998): 87-108.

Writing in 1611, Aemilia Lanyer, like other women poets of the era, faced the challenge of professing a poetic vocation in a cultural context that, rather than providing models for female poetic subjectivity, denounced women writers and belittled their efforts, largely reserving poetic profession to men. Lanyer used many means in the Salve Deus Rex Judæorum to countermand this “anti-tradition”: by writing about religion, one (perhaps limited) means of authorial empowerment open to seventeenth-century women; through the patronage poems that begin her work, where she positions herself favorably in relationship to the titled women they address;¹ and by her identification throughout the Salve Deus with Christ, a figure at once lowly, like Lanyer, and at the same time “king of kings,” the source of all authority in the Christian world view. Another means by which Lanyer professed poetry—one I think particularly significant to understanding how she saw herself in relationship to other poets—was her use of the pastoral mode, the literary form that had traditionally signaled a poet's debut in the world of serious literature through its invocation of Orpheus, the mythic father of poetry. Lanyer gestures to pastoral conventions by addressing Anne Clifford as a “Faire Shepheardesse” in “To the Ladie Anne, Countesse of Dorcet”; by proposing to present Christ “in a Shepheards weed” in her poem to Mary Sidney; and by figuring him so three times in the “Salve Deus Rex Judæorum” itself, in one passage at some length.² But I want to suggest that these references are only hints of a larger project—carried out in “The Authors Dreame to the Ladie Marie, the Countesse Dowager of Pembrooke,” one of the prefatory poems, and in the final poem of the book, “The Description of Cooke-ham”—whereby Lanyer invokes the conventions of the initiatory pastoral poem, drawing on that long generic history to figure herself as poet.

Lanyer's choice of these particular poems as loci for poetic profession is telling. As Celeste Schenck has argued, certain genres traditionally serve to articulate a poetic voice: “[C]eremonial poems, even occasional pieces composed under patronage, often bear a vocational subtext, an obsessive concern with the conditions that occasioned them … During the course of such initiatory dramas, poets pronounce epitaphs on literary apprenticeship and articulate … successful passage to mature vocation.”³ Schenck's understanding of the “vocational subtext” of such poems goes far to explain Lanyer's “obsessive concern” in “Cooke-ham” with the book's commissioning by Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, as well as Lanyer's efforts to establish her connection to female patrons such as Mary Sidney and points the reader to the poems' reliance on features of the initiatory pastoral poem.⁴ By invoking these generic forms, Lanyer positions herself in a poetic lineage that stretches from Theocritus through Virgil and Spenser—and beyond Lanyer to Milton. At the same time, Lanyer's use of the pastoral departs significantly from this patrilineage, implying that, if the pastoral were to serve to authorize female poetic voice, the relationship of female to male within the generic conventions would have to be altered and the cultural assumptions upon which the genre rested would have to be rethought from within the genre itself. The result is a new articulation of the pastoral that challenges the way poetic subjectivity and, thus, poetic voice are constructed.

For the purpose of this inquiry, I am not interested in pastoral generic conventions as realized in dramatized conversations between artificial shepherds in an Arcadian landscape (although such a scene forms part of “The Authors Dreame”). Rather I want to focus on the way those motifs of pastoral derived from the Orpheus myth have been traditionally used as a context for claiming a poetic vocation: in particular, Orpheus's poetic lineage, the context of love and loss that engender his poetry, the fragmentation necessary to poetic expression, the power of poetry to charm nature, and the stellification of the poet. While the story of Orpheus itself suggests two of the principal kinds of poetry that commonly mark initiatory pastoral poems—epithalamium and elegy—it is the mythic figuring of Orpheus as urpoet that makes Orphic narrative the stuff of poetic profession. Thus Edmund Spenser's “Epithalamion” is more significant to my discussion than his Shepheardes Calender (though the latter work is of course a vocational poem), for it is in the wedding song that he models himself on Orpheus (the poet whom the woods answer) and professes poetry within a genre—epithalamium—whose origins are linked to the Orpheus story. By writing in that genre and by alluding to Orpheus, Spenser claims for himself the status of poet, only secondarily immortalizing his love for his wife.⁵ John Milton's “Lycidas” is a fuller expression of the initiatory pastoral form, drawing generically on both epithalamium and elegy, lamenting the death of the poet's friend, a type of Orpheus, and seeming to find consolation in a vision of the marriage scene in the heavenly Jerusalem. What makes Edward King worth a poem of this caliber is not his existence as Milton's sometime friend, but his figuring as poet corpse on whose body Milton can construct a poetic self.⁶ Of course, not all epithalamia and elegies articulate poetic profession. But, in the context of topoi derived from the story of Orpheus, both genres serve to construct a poetic self upon the body of the beloved. The strange confluence of these genres is to be found in the Orphic material transmitted by Ovid and Virgil as well as in pastoral poetry from the earliest times. And the poetic convention of mourning the “death” of the virgin and her virginity in marriage has archaic Greek origins (in Sappho, for example). Schenck suggests that the two genres are merely apparently contradictory, that they in fact have “unexpected similarities.” Both genres, she says, are “designed to defer closure by ritually marking passage from one state to another,” elegy by “ensuring the corpse's resuscitation” through “apotheosis and stellification,” and epithalamium by its celebrating the “insemination of the bride and [the] imagined future of her issue.”⁷

I would further suggest that epithalamium imitates elegy because some kind of death or loss is the necessary precondition of each: the obvious precursor to lament, but also necessary to epithalamia in the Spenserian tradition informed by the Petrarchan mode where the male self is constructed at the expense of female subjectivity. The object of male desire is, as object, silent and passive (if not dead), notwithstanding the poet's description of his torments at her hands. Indeed, the need to reassert male primacy in the amorous exchange may play a part in the construction of a love “object” by the poet subject. Beatrice may thus be the ideal inamorata, but even Stella will serve, and serve better the more she resembles Beatrice and the less she resembles Penelope Devereux. Studies like Nancy J. Vickers's “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme” delineate the dismemberment of the female love object in the blazon of the Petrarchan tradition. Vickers cites Josette Feral who argues that “Woman remains the instrument by which man attains unity, and she pays for it at the price of her own dispersion.” Or, as Vickers puts it, “bodies fetishized … do not have a voice of their own; the world of making words, of making texts, is not theirs.”⁸ Marguerite Waller has also suggested that the self engendered by the Renaissance lyric is always gendered, always male, that “[t]he political economy of sovereign male self-hood is … dependent upon reducing woman to the status of an object.”⁹ Thus both epithalamium, the celebration of love, and elegy, the lament for the dead, destroy the object of love. In both genres, identity is constructed at the expense of affection.¹⁰

This confluence of genres is perhaps felicitous for a poet like Spenser, but problematizes the question of vocation for Lanyer, who must contrive to silence the beloved without silencing herself, to construct a self in a tradition that fragments the woman. As Wendy Wall puts it, “How could [a woman] become an author if she was the Other against which ‘authors’ differentiated themselves? If she was the body of the text?”¹¹ Further, Lanyer, like other poet-initiates, was faced with the problem of creating a requisite corpse upon which to construct the poetic self, celebrating the death of one's (supposedly greater) predecessor in order to create a space for one's own voice. So Milton gives us Edward King as Orpheus, great poet and Christian shepherd, when historical data show him to have been neither. Lanyer, however, had the additional need to construct, for the purpose of claiming vocation, a female poetic predecessor. To figure herself overtly as the heir to Virgil or even Spenser—if only in the golden world of poetry—may have seemed impossible, given the contemporary hostility to women poets. That lineage of male poets may have functioned more as a barrier than a portal to female subjectivity and poetic vocation. But more important in Lanyer's case is the fact that men are almost wholly absent from her work—absent from the list of patrons whom she addresses and (with the paradoxical exception of Jesus) absent from the “Salve Deus” itself except as two-dimensional Christ-killers. Lanyer's work is gynocentric, and a male poetic mentor would contradict the primacy of women in her poetic world. Lanyer's task, then, was two-fold. Paradoxically, she needed both to construct an ideal world of women mentor poets (one that had no referent known to her in the history and lineage of poetry)¹² and to enact the death and silencing of those mentors in order to create a space for her poetic profession.

So, while some readers of Lanyer's dedications and “Cooke-ham” have commented on the dubiousness of the poem's presentation of Lanyer's close relationship with Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, and her daughter, Anne Clifford—when neither Clifford's diary nor Cumberland's correspondence mentions Lanyer¹³—such observations must be paired with Dr. Johnson's complaint that “Lycidas” is flawed because “We know that [Milton and King] never drove a field, and that they had no flocks to batten.”¹⁴ Johnson and Lanyer's critics are objecting that the pastoral relationship is a poetic construct when, of course, that is the very point. The purpose of the poem is to articulate poetic voice through poetic construction, to profess vocation through elegy. So Lanyer's claim to have a relationship with these women should not necessarily drive us to biographical research (any more than we should scour the records for references to Milton's—or Spenser's, or Virgil's—lost years as a shepherd).

By arguing that Lanyer consciously made use of the tradition of poetic apprenticeship (with its program of genres and lineage of mentor poets), I do not mean to imply that Lanyer experienced a Bloomian anxiety of influence. I assume that the generic tradition and its mythic narratives do not necessarily presuppose the Freudian family romance embraced by Harold Bloom's argument.¹⁵ Rather I wish to suggest that the rituals and genres of poetic initiation existed as givens for Lanyer and her contemporaries, and that, inasmuch as she saw herself as a poet (and I am arguing here that she did, quite self-consciously), she embraced such forms as the means to poetic legitimacy. As Ann Rosalind Jones puts it, writers of the era, female and male alike, “shared the expectation that the poet enters the literary realm through imitation, that is, by participating in some recognizable way in preestablished literary modes—most directly, by invoking the texts of a magisterial predecessor.”¹⁶ Or, as Richard Helgerson puts it in his discussion of the “laureate poet,” such a poet “had to speak to his own time in a language it might be expected to understand, even if only to say that he was of all time.”¹⁷ Lanyer was aware, then, that her poem would stand “in a given relationship to certain past poems” and she could hope that, “once published, [it] would be assimilated with them in their relationship to future poems,” to borrow Thomas M. Greene's analysis of Spenser's relationship to his “Epithalamion.”¹⁸ This is not to suggest that Lanyer found the pre-existent model an easy fit. Insofar as poetic “making” is understood in the Western tradition as a male activity (pace Sappho's fame in the ancient world; vide her effective silencing through Ovid's popular myth of her suicide), the narratives of poetic apprenticeship resemble other male-centered narratives formative of identity and subjectivity. When the poetic tradition engenders male identity at the expense of female agency, a woman seeking to construct female poetic subjectivity will be forced to modify the elements of poetic initiation and the gendered relationships such genres assume—in Jones's words, to find ways “to maneuver within … the masculine perspective built into erotic conventions named after founding fathers and sons.”¹⁹

At the same time, I wish to modify the notion of a “sisterhood” of female poets, both that suggested by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their argument for a female tradition defined by “anxiety of authorship” and, more particularly for my argument, Barbara Kiefer Lewalski's understanding of Lanyer as the creator of an “ideal community” of female patrons and as “defender and celebrant of an imagined community of good women” in “The Description of Cooke-ham.”²⁰ I do not find a pervasive “dis-ease” in Lanyer's work, those “feelings of self-doubt, inadequacy, and inferiority” that Gilbert and Gubar see as characterizing the works of nineteenth-century women writers who are the focus of their study.²¹ Lanyer certainly does make the conventional apologies for her lack of poetic ability, but in such a way as to call into question the primacy of male poetic gifts.²² Indeed, her proto-feminist theology argues the superiority of women to men. But while Lanyer's work indicates a need for a matrilineage of poets, she uses those models of female poetic authority not as a static community of good women, but for a specific vocational purpose: to legitimate her own work by placing the women whose fame she invokes (Mary Sidney, Anne Clifford, and Margaret, Countess of Cumberland) in the conventional framework of the initiatory pastoral poem and constructing her own poetic subjectivity in the space created—and vacated—by the mentor poets. Insofar as such a model of poetic profession presupposes a necessary conflict between the poet speaker and the poet memorialized (though not necessarily an oedipal conflict), my reading finds a complex tension between Lanyer and the women of Cooke-ham and between Lanyer and her potential patrons rather than the “enduring female community” and “family of maternal and sisterly patronesses” suggested by Lewalski.²³ Rather, I argue that Lanyer uses these powerful women as a means for constructing her own poetic subjectivity, often at the expense of an individual woman's virtue or power—though not, significantly, at the expense of women in general, who remain, in Lanyer's poetic world, the source and definition of virtue and the repositories of divine power.

Nonetheless, Lanyer's imaginative construction of a community of female poets, both in the poem to Mary Sidney and in “Cooke-ham,” does serve to point up the lack of such a community of women in the history of poetry. As S. K. Heninger Jr. notes, the pastoral “is art as compensation for what a culture lacks, rather than art as expression of what a culture has achieved.”²⁴ Indeed, Claudio Guillén suggests that part of the purpose of pastoral is to restore harmony to a world in which disharmony is the norm, “threaten[ing] not only individuals but entire political or religious communities.”²⁵ Thus the death figured in pastoral is also the loss of community—an association that recalls Heather Dubrow's comment about “Lycidas” that it is “concerned with types of community or the violation of them. The speaker mourns the loss not only of Lycidas but also of the pastoral community in which the two of them participated.”²⁶ But the loss figured in Lanyer's poem is doubled, for her community of women is one that had never existed. One is called upon to mourn not only her exile from the community at “Cooke-ham,” but all women's disbarment from the world of poets. Yet even this loss serves, in the context of the vocational poem, to underscore Lanyer's vocation as poet, for it is only her poems that have the paradoxical power both to restore the lost community of women at “Cooke-ham,” to make it live again forever, and to defy the absence of a female poetic tradition, for that seeming absolute lack is disproved by the very existence of the woman poet who mourns the loss.

Indeed, pastoral elegy traditionally ends with consolation for loss and a restoration of harmony. In a movement of descent and ascent, the genre mirrors the shape of the Orphic narrative: such poems “praise, lament, and console.”²⁷ This consolation is variously figured in the history of the genre. Virgil's fifth eclogue ends with a joyful ode to the dead Daphnis. In scenes reminiscent of Orpheus's poetic power, the woods and countryside rejoice at the presence of Daphnis, another shepherd-poet-god: “the very mountains, with woods unshorn, joyously fling their voices starward; the very rocks, the very groves ring out the song.”²⁸ Such an image is, of course, the refrain of Spenser's “Epithalamion.” In Spenser's poem, it is also the ordering and closure of marriage that promises to console and to restore harmony, as in Milton's “Lycidas,” where the marriage of the bridegroom Christ to the saints in heaven figures the consolation of resurrection. In Lanyer's “Cooke-ham,” however, marriage, rather than figuring harmony and restoration, is the cause of loss, the disordering force that occasions elegy and engenders her poetic voice. Thus, in Lanyer's poems, it is ultimately only poetry and the poet that have the power to unify. As in the Orphic narrative itself, where Orpheus is given the ability to evoke Eurydice's memory in poetry that charms both the inhabitants of the underworld and all nature, so in Lanyer's poems, she finds consolation for death and loss almost exclusively in Orphic terms, in the ability of poetry to remember what is past, making it forever present.

Lanyer's use of the features of the Orphic narrative first appears in her poem to Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, where she proposes to figure the “Saviour in a Shepheards weed.” Indeed, it is here that one expects Lanyer to use such conventions, for Mary Sidney—whose psalm translations were circulating in manuscript at the time Lanyer wrote her book, and whose name signified Poetry to those who idolized her brother, Philip—represented perhaps better than any other Englishwoman the ideal female poet. If Spenser constructs his poetic vocation on the corpse/corpus of Virgil and Chaucer, and Milton on Virgil's and Spenser's, it would be logical for Lanyer to announce her poetic vocation through an elegy on a female poet such as Mary Sidney. However, Mary Sidney was, most inconveniently, not dead. Rather than fictionalizing a female mentor poet on the body of a dead woman in the manner of Milton's Lycidas/Edward King, Lanyer intimates Mary Sidney's symbolic death, silencing the live Mary Sidney by placing her in a mythic heavenly landscape—the realm of the happy dead, but dead nonetheless—and by fusing her poetic person to that of her dead brother.

The setting for “The Authors Dreame” is “th'Edalyan Groves,” a mythic landscape where all the Graces and select goddesses dwell. Lanyer seems to refer here to Mount Ida, the setting for the Judgment of Paris (a scene that Lanyer recalls in the poem to Queen Anne, as well).²⁹ By setting her dream in this landscape, Lanyer both invokes the pastoral and recalls the mythic beauty contest that impugns women for their supposedly inherent vanity and their envy of each other's charms. But here the goddess Envy shrinks to nothingness, “Her venime purifi'd by virtues raies” (line 104). Thus Bellona (who is here goddess of wisdom as well as war) carries not only a spear and shield, but olive branches (lines 37-9); Dictina (Diana) gives away her “bowe and silver shaftes” (line 49); and the suggestion of rivalry between her and Aurora and the possibility of competition is dispelled by the presence of “great Messias, Lord of unitie,” the only male figure in the dream vision (line 120). Lanyer has replaced the mythic Mount Ida of female objectification with a landscape where women are empowered as warriors and poets. Such women are neither the passive recipients of men's evaluation (“the fairest”), nor are they seen as motivated primarily by vanity.

Rather Lanyer has created a poetic space in which both women and poetry are valued. In place of the beauty contest, there is a singing contest enacted by the river Pergusa (a Sicilian, and thus appropriately pastoral, river) that results in the triumph of Mary Sidney's psalm versifications. This scene recalls the singing contests particular to pastoral wherein two rustic swains attempt to out-sing each other in praise of a woman. Here the contest is to discover which woman can devise the finest “holy hymnes”—actually, no contest, for the goddesses immediately fix on Mary Sidney's psalms, the “holy Sonnets” set to “her noble breasts sweet harmony” (lines 121, 123). Three points are significant here. First, praise of women's physical beauty, the subject of the Judgment of Paris and of the pastoral singing contest, is replaced by praise of their virtue and poetic ability. Second, romantic love, one subject of the pastoral, is replaced by divine love, and women, rather than being the object of poetry, are its makers; any hint of the marriage that traditionally authorizes romantic love is banished from the scene. Indeed, the stream Pergusa is associated with Hades and Persephone.³⁰ Its presence suggests the extreme objectification of women through rape and may comment negatively on romantic love as it is often figured. Finally, and most significantly for Lanyer's vocational project, Mary Sidney is silenced as poet at the same time that she seems to be praised excessively. Her great work, her translation of the psalms, is finished, and Sidney herself, as an inhabitant of heaven (or of the author's dream, or of the author's poem), can produce nothing more—nothing that could challenge the primacy of Lanyer, the poet who means to replace Sidney even as she writes in praise of her. Mary Sidney's praises are written “in th'eternall booke / Of endlesse honour, true fames memorie” (lines 127-8), but her poetry is not to be written in the world of living poets.

Lanyer further displaces Mary Sidney by underscoring her link to Philip Sidney (here figured as an Orpheus), thus implying her stellification.³¹ As the mythic poet's lyre became a constellation after his death, so Sidney has become a “light to all that tread true paths of Fame,” one “[w]ho in the globe of heav'n doth shine so bright” (lines 139-140). The statement that, though Philip Sidney is “dead, his fame doth him survive” (line 141), repeats a commonplace of elegy that poetry has the power to mitigate death, to soften the pain of loss. But this memorializing is extended to Mary Sidney when Lanyer compares her favorably to Philip:

                              a Sister well shee may be deemd,
To him that liv'd and di'd so nobly;
And farre before him is to be esteemed
For virtue, wisedome, learning, dignity.

(lines 149-52)

With that coupling, it becomes Mary Sidney whose stellification Lanyer celebrates, “Whose beauteous soule hath gain'd a double life, / Both here on earth, and in the heav'ns above.” Until the end of time—“Till dissolution end all worldly strife”—Mary Sidney's “blessed spirit [not living body] remaines … / Directing all by her immortall light” (lines 153-7). Like Milton's Lycidas, heavenly inhabitant and “Genius of the shore” who protects “all that wander in that perilous flood,”³² Mary Sidney is safely removed from the world of the budding poet. The “aftercomming ages” may “reade / Her love, her zeale, her faith, and pietie,” but the present age will listen to a new poetic voice (lines 161-2). Lanyer's offer at the end of the dedicatory poem to present Mary Sidney with the “Salve Deus” shows Sidney to be appropriately passive and Lanyer to be in control of poetic construction. Lanyer recalls her dream and reiterates that her “cleare reason sees her [Sidney] by that streame”—that is, still in a heavenly landscape and, thus, silenced—and claims to present a true (poetic) picture of Mary Sidney's virtues: “My Glasse beeing steele, declares them to be true” (lines 207, 212). In a final gesture of self-authorization, Lanyer claims the power to present the good shepherd, “your Saviour in a Shepheards weed,” to Mary Sidney's view. Lanyer makes the obligatory claim of unworthiness, but this self-deprecation is linked to Jesus' “worthinesse,” her humility linked to his (line 218).

In this way, Lanyer professes poetry in her poem to Mary Sidney by building on the conventions of pastoral poetic initiation. She begins by constructing a world where women exercise poetic authority, a world where Lanyer can figure a female poet mentor whose praise seems to be the occasion of the poem. But by the end of the poem, praise has turned to eulogy and Mary Sidney is a corpse/corpus, a fixed and finished work, a closed book, whose silencing creates the space in which Lanyer can speak. Likewise, Lanyer's “Description of Cooke-ham” also draws on pastoral material to profess poetic vocation, presenting a rich complex of generic elements wherein lament, elegy, and epithalamium are used to articulate consolation through poetry's power to resurrect and make immortal.³³ But “Cooke-ham,” while making use of generic material from both elegy and epithalamium, blurs distinctions between the two modes in such a way as to form a radical reassessment of the meaning of marriage and women's place in society. In “Cooke-ham,” the loss in death is not opposed to the joy of epithalamium but is rather occasioned by marriage, here the marriage of Anne Clifford to Richard Sackville, soon to be Earl of Dorset; marriage is what destroys the community of women that Lanyer constructs. Thus marriage, in the world of “Cooke-ham,” does not represent a contrast to the pain of death, but is rather the cause of loss, a kind of death in itself, and inextricably linked to elegiac grief. Such a generic inversion may be inevitable, a precondition to the profession of female poetic subjectivity. Insofar as epithalamium silences the woman into both the objectifying, dismembering forms of the blazon and the gendered hierarchy and loss of identity occasioned by marriage, Lanyer is impelled to reverse the valences of romantic love and marriage if she is to profess poetic vocation.

One might go so far as to suggest that Lanyer's “Cooke-ham” represents in this way an anti-epithalamium.³⁴ While Lanyer's poem replicates the social relationships traditional to epithalamium—she is dependent on the patronage of the upper class, represented in the persons of the bride and bridegroom—Lanyer reverses or omits many other features one would expect to find in a poem celebrating an aristocratic marriage.³⁵ In place of the joy of the wedding guests, the mood of Lanyer's epithalamium is elegiac. In contrast to Spenser “ringing” woods, the flora and fauna of Cooke-ham mourn rather than celebrate Clifford's marriage. In Lanyer's poem, marriage does not define and affirm community but disrupts relationships and destroys the society of women. Moreover, instead of constructing the poem traditionally around the events of one solar wedding day, Lanyer exiles all description of the wedding from the world of the poem, a world that was joyous only before Clifford's wedding, and constructs her poem in a parody of the epithalamic earthly round where the warmth and light of day lead not to the intimate darkness of the marriage chamber but to the dark death of winter. Lanyer, the poet-“celebrator” of the wedding, joins the creatures of Cooke-ham in mourning the loss of Clifford to marriage rather than joining in the festivities, as is traditional. And while mourning the loss of virginity often forms part of the epithalamic tradition, such loss is always superseded by the promise of marriage and, specifically, of children. But Lanyer finesses the obligatory discussion of Clifford's virtue, and the future of Clifford's and Sackville's life together, including the possibility of children, falls utterly outside the poetic boundaries of “Cooke-ham.” If Lanyer as epithalamic poet serves as “advocate for society,” as Greene suggests, it is not to “assur[e] the couple that they are fortunate, that they are doing wisely to marry, wishing them the socially valuable blessings of prosperity, harmony, and increase.”³⁶ Rather, she is an advocate for the society that was in the idealized world of Cooke-ham, not a society whose bonds are strengthened by a noble marriage, but one that is destroyed by it. Insofar as the epithalamic tradition held the potential to provide “a reassuring antithesis to tensions about social roles in general and gender roles in particular,” in Dubrow's words, Lanyer seems here to exploit the tensions rather than making use of the genre's ability to resolve conflict.³⁷

So the loss upon which Lanyer constructs poetic vocation is the loss of place, of person, and of community. “Farewell (sweet Cooke-ham),” the poet laments, but place soon merges with person so that it is at times impossible to tell whether Lanyer addresses the place or the Lady of the poem, Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland:

Farewell (sweet Place) where Virtue then did rest,
And all delights did harbour in her breast:
Never shall my sad eies againe behold
Those pleasures which my thoughts did then unfold:

(lines 7-10)

There is some distinction here between the “her” and the “sweet Place,” but both are linked here in relationship to the poet—together they represent the loss that occasions lament. Further blurring the distinction between place and person is the fact that Anne Clifford is figured as the house itself, something constructed. She is the one “in whose faire breast true virtue then was hous'd”: “Oh what delight did my weake spirits find / In those pure parts of her well framed mind” (lines 97-8; my emphasis). So Lanyer initially merges the women with the landscape and the house, expanding the loss of place to intimate the death of the women. While Clifford and Cumberland, in “reality,” continue to exist outside and after Lanyer's poem, they have died to the poet speaker and to the time and space immortalized by the poem. As Lanyer, supplicant companion to the two great ladies, seems in fact to have been exiled from those women's company and from Cooke-ham against her will, this reversal underscores Lanyer's agency in the poetic world. In that world, Lanyer's voice continues to speak the loss of the other women (which, in the poem, has always already occurred), preempting Lanyer's rejection and perhaps even objectification in the real world of titles and wealth.

In another sense, the death that occasions the poem seems to be a death of immediate vision, like the death of the woman Eurydice that Orpheus can touch. But, as Orpheus's experience of Eurydice was mediated by language and was itself a construct, so Lanyer acknowledges that even at Cooke-ham her experience was mediated by her thoughts: the “pleasures” of Cooke-ham were ones that the poet's “thoughts did then unfold” (line 10). Lanyer's awareness that she creates experience allies her with Orpheus and other poets, all the makers and memorializers of shared cultural awareness. The “Mistris of that Place” and the place itself combine here to figure Eurydice, the construct of the poet's imagination that engenders poetic song. Cooke-ham and the Lady are both inspirations for Lanyer's “worke of Grace” (lines 11, 12). While experience may be a construct, it is nonetheless the loss of experience that necessitates the poet's vocation: the recreation of experience through memory, the re-membering of what has been scattered. Thus the loss of place, the loss of community, the figurative deaths of Clifford and Cumberland, and the “death” that marriage brings all function as the fragmented corpse upon which Lanyer can construct her vocation.

However, while the deaths upon which Lanyer has figured her poetic self are scattered throughout her work, the women's bodies are not fragmented and objectified, as is traditional in the love lyric and the epithalamium. Instead, it is the landscape, from which Lanyer ultimately distinguishes the women, that is dismembered. In “Cooke-ham,” it is nature, not Diana, that is described. Therefore, though women are linked to nature, the traditional pairing does not represent a matrix to be ordered by the poet. Rather Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, at once is merged with the place and is the source of its order and beauty; it is in response to her arrival, not that of the bridegroom, that the woods answer and echo. As Orpheus could “draw the woods and rocks to follow him” and could “mak[e] the oaks attend his strain,”³⁸ as Spenser's Orphic bridegroom made all the woods “answer and their Eccho ring,” so when Cumberland is present at Cooke-ham, the whole world responds with joy:

The Walkes put on their summer Liveries,
And all things else did hold like similies:
The Trees with leaves, with fruits, with flowers clad,
Embrac'd each other, seeming to be glad,
Turning themselves to beauteous Canopies,
To shade the bright Sunne from your brighter eies:
The cristall Streames with silver spangles graced,
While by the glorious Sunne they were embraced:
The little Birds in chirping notes did sing,
To entertaine both You and that sweet Spring.
And Philomela with her sundry leyes,
Both You and that delightfull Place did praise.
Oh how me thought each plant, each floure, each tree
Set forth their beauties then to welcome thee:
The very Hills right humbly did descend,
When you to tread upon them did intend.

(lines 21-36)

Cumberland's characterization as poet is both underscored and complicated here by the presence of Philomela, nightingale-poet of another ancient story of fragmentation and poetic voice. As Patrick Cheney argues in his analysis of Spenser's poetic career, Philomela's presence marks the pastoral from Theocritus and represents “an ur-myth of pastoral poetry” that Spenser uses “to define the transcendent song of the famous pastoral poet as a preparation for epic,” that is, as a mark of poetic initiation.³⁹ However, unlike Spenser, who in his Shepheardes Calender figures Philomela as male (perhaps in imitation of Petrarch), Lanyer figures Philomela as the female poet of the passage who sings praises of Cumberland and the locus amoenus. In this passage, then, Cumberland is both a type of Orpheus, to whom all nature responds, and a type of Eurydice, when she is allied (once again) with the place and is the occasion of Philomela's—and Lanyer's—song.

But having associated Cumberland and Clifford with loss and having constructed them as subjects in one poetic gesture, Lanyer silences the women, again by figuring each as a character in the Orphic narrative. Like Milton's Lycidas, Clifford is called “Shepheardesse” in the dedication to her (line 133) and also appears as a kind of shepherdess playmate to the poet in “Cooke-ham.” Lanyer recounts their “former sports … [w]herein my selfe did alwaies beare a part” (lines 119, 121). The real Anne Clifford was a writer, if not a published poet, and Lanyer may have seen her as some sort of poetic rival, if only within the world of pastoral.⁴⁰ In a scenario reminiscent of Persephone's “fall” to Hades, Anne Clifford's marriage causes the death of all nature that “Cooke-ham” recounts. And like Persephone, Clifford seems to suffer by association with a disreputable husband the loss of her reputation and, perhaps, virtue. Lanyer says that “virtue then was hous'd” in Clifford's “faire breast” before her marriage (line 96), that she was “then a virgin faire” (line 160). The repetition of “then” in these two references to Anne Clifford no doubt serves to delineate the world of experience from the world of poetry, but, more importantly, it calls into question the current state of Clifford's virtue. Further, among the “pleasures past, which will not turne againe” is the memory of Clifford's “former sports, / So farre from beeing toucht by ill reports” (lines 118-20). Here the mention of the absence of ill reports in the past suggests their existence in the present.⁴¹ The repeated effacing of Anne Clifford from the “now” of the poem, combined with intimations of her loss of virtue and her figuring as Persephone, effectively silence Clifford, making of her a requisite corpse upon which poetic vocation can be constructed.

Further, the association of Anne Clifford with Persephone makes her mother, the Countess of Cumberland, a figure of Demeter. The death of the landscape at Cooke-ham is the loss of fertility throughout the world in winter as Demeter withdraws her life-giving power to mourn her daughter's absence. At Cooke-ham, “[t]he floures that on the banks and walkes did grow, / Crept in the ground” (lines 179-80) and

Each arbour, banke, each seate, each stately tree,
Lookes bare and desolate now for want of thee;
Turning greene tresses into frostie gray,
While in cold griefe they wither all away.
The Sunne grew weake, his beames no comfort gave,
While all greene things did make the earth their grave.

(lines 191-6)

This passage also recalls Orpheus, for all nature mourned with him when he, for a time, ceased to make music following the death of Eurydice. So, while the nature of Clifford's and Cumberland's roles in the Orphic narrative fluctuates (now Orpheus, now Eurydice, now Persephone, now Demeter), their association with pastoral and with poetry is only underscored by the multiplicity of allusion. They represent paradoxically both poetic subjectivity and objectification in their associations, and serve to construct female poetic subjectivity in general as well as Lanyer's particular vocation as poet.

The death of the landscape figured at the end of the poem also represents the intrusion of temporality into the paradisal world of Cooke-ham that is lost forever. As Dubrow has argued recently, pastoral “restores and returns” a world of cyclical events (seasons, songs), substituting for the loss of Eden “not timelessness but rather models of time based on repetiton and hence continuity.” At the same time, by rupturing the eternal return of seasons from within (et in Arcadio ego), pastoral does not draw an absolute divide between the world of cycles and the world of linear, once-and-never-again time. Dubrow shows how the thief and thievery—both intrinsic to pastoral—“remove and destroy” the continuity the genre seeks to enact.⁴² Lanyer's poem embodies this paradox: the very fact that the cycle of seasons is dependent on Margaret Clifford's coming and going puts the spoiler at the heart of the locus amoenus. But it is the poet herself who marks the passage from pastoral to temporal by playing the thief. When Cumberland bids farewell to a “faire tree” (which the women had frequented during their time at Cooke-ham) “with a chaste, yet loving kisse” (lines 162, 165), the poet surprisingly steals the kisse, “[s]corning a sencelesse creature should possesse / So rare a favour, so great happinesse” (lines 167-8). Furthermore, she refuses to give the tree a kiss in return (“No other kisse it could receive from me, / For feare to give back what it tooke of thee” [lines 169-70]), marking the end of what Dubrow calls “world of communal sharing and giving,” the “uncommercial world of plenitude” celebrated by pastoral, and initiating the world of “commodification” and private property that defines—and perhaps engenders—thievery.⁴³ Rather than being a victim of the pastoral dissolution (and the break with her noble companions), the poet controls the poetic return to temporality.

This passage further reinforces the poet's vocational claim by use of a mirroring structure, recalling the poet's mimetic power to represent.⁴⁴ Death comes in a reversal of the enlivening of nature that the poet catalogued at the beginning of the poem. The line “The House receiv'd all ornaments to grace it” (line 19) is mirrored by “The house cast off each garment that might grace it” (line 201); and the lines “Each Arbour, Banke, each Seate, each stately Tree / Thought themselves honor'd in supporting thee” (lines 45-6) are mirrored by “Each arbour, banke, each seate, each stately tree, / Lookes bare and desolate now for want of thee” (lines 191-2). Again, as in the dedication to Mary Sidney, Lanyer is claiming the power, through poetry, to reflect the truth.

Yet the mirror of the poet does more than simply reduplicate an image. Lanyer recounts the death of “Eccho” at the end of the poem who, wont to reply to the women's words, “did now for sorrow die” (line 200). As Vickers has argued, Echo “reduc[es] speech to repetition [and] eliminates its generative capacity.”⁴⁵ Or, as Joseph Loewenstein puts it, Echo threatens “the humanity of language” and circumscribes the power of the poet by usurping the poetic voice.⁴⁶ Rather than mere repetition, the function of poetry in the face of death and loss is remembering that which has been dismembered. So Lanyer exiles Echo and, instead, invokes Memory, the mother of the Muses (and, thus, Orpheus's grandmother), as the sign of her poetic power: “Therefore sweet Memorie doe thou retaine / Those pleasures past, which will not turne againe” (lines 117-8). Cumberland, too, places the memories of Cooke-ham in her heart, “Giving great charge to noble Memory, / There to preserve their love continually” (lines 155-6). But though she possesses the ability to “get things by heart,” as it were, she cannot preserve the joys of Cooke-ham, but can only, echo-like, “repeat the pleasures which had past” (line 163). Memory, it turns out, is not a power to be succored by just anybody, but only by the poet. As Lanyer opens the poem with the claim that Cooke-ham is the place “where the Muses gave their full consent, / I should have powre the virtuous to content” (lines 3-4) and suggests that she was commissioned by Cumberland, she has by the end of the poem claimed the sole ability to re-member the place. In her words alone can Cooke-ham live: “This last farewell to Cooke-ham here I give, / When I am dead thy name in this may live” (lines 205-6). While it is a commonplace that poetry and poets have the power to memorialize and make what was dead live again, it is not part of the tradition that women have this power. So what is commonplace becomes transgressive as Lanyer professes poetry in a generic context that used women as objects upon which to build male poetic vocation.

Thus, both in her poem to Mary Sidney and in the memorial to Cooke-ham, Lanyer professed her vocation as poet, claiming the power to create for her culture visions of a world in which women are both subjects of—and subject to—poetry. She did so by drawing on generic conventions that poets had traditionally used to claim poetic vocation, dispersing the notion of death through her poems in order to fashion herself a poet. At the same time, Lanyer called into question the dynamics by which poetic identity had been constructed, altering the generic conventions that inscribe women's silence in order to allow the pastoral to initiate female vocation. Romantic love and epithalamium do not symbolize wholeness in a world of brokenness, but rather romantic love is called into question, and marriage, rather than unifying and consoling, destroys the idealized world at Cooke-ham. Yet Lanyer's poems do, finally, offer the consolation particular to poetry. Her imaginative and visionary works, by casting a shadow into the empty space within the tradition where women poets should be, but are not, begin to make the golden world a reality.⁴⁷

Notes

1. For a discussion of Lanyer's complex relationship with her patrons, see my “Sacred Celebration: The Patronage Poems of Aemilia Lanyer,” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (forthcoming 1998 from Univ. of Kentucky Press).

2. Aemilia Lanyer, “To the Ladie Anne, Countesse of Dorcet,” “The Authors Dreame to the Ladie Marie, the Countesse Dowager of Pembrooke, “and “Salve Deus Rex Judæorum,” in The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, ed. Susanne Woods (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 41-7, 46, line 133; pp. 21-31, 31, line 218; and pp. 51-129, 75, 109, 124, lines 560, 1345, 1714-21. Further references to Lanyer's poems will appear parenthetically in the text by line numbers.

   Of course, this figuring of Christ also invokes specifically biblical pastoral images, as well.

3. Celeste Marguerite Schenck, Mourning and Panegyric: The Poetics of Pastoral Ceremony (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1988), p. 2.

4. In fact, it is unclear which part of Lanyer's work was commissioned by the Countess of Cumberland. The third stanza of the “Salve Deus” refers to “Those praisefull lines of that delightfull place” that the Countess “commaunded” her to write (lines 18, 19)—presumably “The Description of Cooke-ham.” In “The Description of Cooke-ham,” however, Lanyer claims that “princely Palace will'd me to indite, / The sacred Storie of the Soules delight” (lines 5-6)—the “Salve Deus” itself. And, of course, Lanyer's afterword “To the doubtfull Reader” implies divine rather than human commissioning. This waffling on Cumberland's actual instructions—displacing the commissioning from poem to poem—and Cumberland's displacement by a divine patron may have the intent of diminishing the part Cumberland plays in the construction of the poems and undergirding Lanyer's role as maker of the works.

5. Patrick Cheney's Spenser's Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1993) tracks Spenser's “career through fundamental strategies of self-presentation,” an “Orphic idea of a literary career” that works through “pastoral, epic, love lyric, and hymn” (pp. 4, 6, 7). Cheney argues that, while the self created in each of these genres “remains the great constant throughout Spenser's typological generic structure, in each phase he emphasizes a different object,” an “Other” which “recurrently turns out to be feminine” (p. 7). Hence Lanyer's—and other women poets'—problem.

6. Don Cameron Allen suggests that “the subject of the poem is seldom Edward King, and his death is not the real occasion of the poem”; rather, “the poem is about Milton and the question [of vocation] that lies on the top of his mind” (The Harmonious Vision: Studies in Milton's Poetry, enl. ed. [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970], pp. 41-70, 61, 62).

7. Schenck, p. 11; Schenck's emphasis. Schenck suggests that “a lyric meditation proceeding from the thought of death … signals the readiness of the pastoral apprentice for transcendence of the mode … The writing of an elegy, even in the absence of a corpse, is a literary gesture signifying admittance of the poet-initiate to the sacred company” (pp. 15-6).

8. Nancy J. Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” CritI [Critical Inquiry] 8, 2 (Winter 1981): 265-79, 272, 277.

9. Marguerite Waller, “Academic Tootsie: The Denial of Difference and the Difference It Makes,” Diacritics 17, 1 (Spring 1987): 2-20, 12.

10. Diana E. Henderson, in her Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender, and Performance (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1995) reminds us that gender negotiations in lyric poems are complex and dependent on cultural and generic context. However, she is interested primarily in women as characters within the poems of male poets rather than the problems women writers using such genres might face.

11. Wendy Wall suggests that women such as Mary Sidney and Lanyer solved the problem by “devis[ing] novel ways of imagining the male body so as to renegotiate the relationship between writer, text, and reader” (“Our Bodies/Our Texts?: Renaissance Women and the Trials of Authorship,” in Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, ed. Carol J. Singley and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney [Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1993], pp. 51-71, 52).

12. Unless one includes biblical figures like Hannah and Mary, both of whom were known as prophets and poets and to whom Lanyer alludes in the “Salve Deus.” See John C. Ulreich and Kari Boyd McBride, “Answerable Styles I: Lanyer and Milton Rewriting the Bible” (The 1997 Conference on John Milton, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN, October 1997), pp. 1-13.

13. See Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, “Rewriting Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer,” YES [Yearbook of English Studies] 21 (1991): 87-106, 100, 105; and her Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), 219-21, for discussion of the relationship between Lanyer, Anne Clifford, and Margaret, Countess of Cumberland.

14. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 3 vols., ed. George Birkbeck Hill (1905; rprt. New York: Octagon Books, 1967), 1:164.

15. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973).

16. Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620 (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1990), p. 1. Jones discusses the use of the “feminine pastoral” by Lanyer's contemporary, Mary Wroth, arguing that Wroth affects “the persona of an abandoned lover taking refuge in rural solitude” in order to “represent women's fidelity in love as a heroic virtue” (pp. 119, 125). While Jones comments in passing on Wroth's (and Gaspara Stampa's) use of the pastoral as an initiatory genre, the focus of her argument lies elsewhere.

17. Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1983), p. 14.

18. Thomas M. Greene, “Spenser and the Epithalamic Convention,” CL [Comparative Literature] 9 (1957): 215. Greene's article provides a most complete history of the epithalamic tradition in English and of Spenser's place in the convention.

19. Jones, p. 2.

20. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), p. 49; and Lewalski, Writing Women, pp. 221, 6.

21. Gilbert and Gubar, p. 60.

22. See especially “To the Queenes most Excellent Majestie,” lines 145-56, where Lanyer's argument finesses the question of male superiority.

23. Lewalski, Writing Women, p. 241.

24. S. K. Heninger Jr., “The Renaissance Perversion of Pastoral,” JHI [Journal of the History of Ideas] 22, 2 (April-June 1961): 254-61, 256.

25. Claudio Guillén, Literature as System: Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), p. 195.

26. Heather Dubrow, Genre (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 41.

27. Morton W. Bloomfield, “The Elegy and the Elegiac Mode: Praise and Alienation,” in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Lewalski (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 147-57, 147.

28. Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I-VI, rev. ed., trans. II. Ruston Fairclough (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956), p. 39.

29. Susanne Woods suggests that the allusion is either to “Idalia, a mountain city in Cyprus, sacred to Venus” or to “Mt. Ida, home of the muses” (The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, p. 21, note to line 1). The reference in line 9 of Lanyer's poem to the Muses, and the absence of Venus from the poem, suggest to me that Mount Ida is the more likely referent (though the Graces, part of Venus's retinue, are mentioned). Either location is potentially pastoral.

    The unusual orthography and metric construction of “Edalyan Groves” also recalls “Elysian Fields,” the habitation of the spirits of the blessed dead. Thus sonority underscores Lanyer's silencing of Sidney through pastoral conventions.

30. “Where they tell the story that Proserpina was abducted by Pluto” (ubi a plutone proserpinam raptam fuisse fabulantur). Charles Estienne [Carolus Stephanus, pseud.], Dictionarium Historicum, Geographicum, Poeticum (1596; rprt. New York: Garland, 1976), s.v. “Pergus.”

31. This pairing of the Sidney siblings seems to have been a commonplace fostered, at least in part, by Mary Sidney herself. In the dedication to her brother in the completed psalm translations, she repeatedly hides her own part in the translating behind his, masks her poetic ambition by reference to his, and intimates her death in his:

    I can no more: Deare Soule I take my leaue;
    Sorrow still striues, would mount thy highest sphere
    presuming so just cause might meet thee there,
    Oh happy change! could I so take my leave.

    Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, The Triumph of Death and Other Unpublished and Uncollected Poems by Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (1561-1621), ed. G. F. Waller (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1977), p. 95. For a discussion of this tradition, see Michael Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family (London: Routledge, 1988), especially pp. 63-7.

32. John Milton, “Lycidas,” John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1957), pp. 120-5, lines 183, 185.

33. “Cooke-ham” is, of course, first and foremost a country house poem. Discussions of it as such can be found in Lewalski's “The Lady of the Country-House Poem” (in The Fashioning and Functioning of the British Country House, ed. Gervase Jackson-Stops et al. [Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 1989], pp. 261-75), where Lewalski summarizes many of her earlier arguments about “Cooke-ham.” See also my “Mapping Domestic Politics: The Country House and the Country Poem” (University of Arizona, 1997).

34. Thanks to Heather Dubrow for this most apt term.

35. See Greene, pp. 218-20, for a discussion of the genre's topoi. See also Dubrow's A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamium (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990) for an analysis of how “the epithalamium interacts with the conditions of marriage in Stuart England” (p. 44). She is particularly interested in “the anxieties about marriage in general and sexuality in particular that are never far from the surface of this poem” (p. 37).

36. Greene, p. 221.

37. Dubrow, A Happier Eden, p. 61.

38. Ovid, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. Mary M. Innes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955), p. 246; and Virgil, p. 233.

39. Cheney, p. 86.

40. There is an undercurrent of hostility in the dedicatory poem to Anne Clifford as well, which is little more than an extended tirade against class inequality—not an innocent topic of address to a noblewoman. See my “Corpus Christi: Word and Sacrament in the Poems of Aemilia Lanyer” and “Answerable Styles II: Lanyer and Milton Rewriting the Social Text,” co-authored with John C. Ulreich (The 1997 Conference on John Milton, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN, October 1997) for explorations of Lanyer's attitude toward class.

41. Indeed, Anne Clifford was infamous in her lifetime for her adamant refusal to sign over any portion of her inheritance, though even James I attempted to persuade her. However, such stubbornness would hardly constitute “ill reports,” and would not have been an issue in 1610 when Lanyer's poems were being written. Clifford's husbands, on the other hand—including Richard Sackville, Earl of Dorset, her first husband—were notorious debauchees. Whether Dorset's reputation would have besmirched Anne by the time Lanyer was writing her poem is open to speculation, but Lanyer's hints here suggest some sort of notoriety. For a description of Clifford's husbands, see Lewalski, Writing Women, pp. 128-30. Clifford's reputation in her later years was beyond reproach. She supported poets, “friends, even Dorset's bastard daughters,” and provided two almhouses for poor women (Lewalski, Writing Women, p. 130).

42. Dubrow, “Playing Cops and Robbers, or, Some Versions of Pastoral in Shakespearean Texts” (paper presented at the annual MLA Convention, Washington DC, December 1996), p. 5. This paper forms part of a forthcoming book provisionally entitled “Shakespeare's Languages of Loss.”

43. Loc. cit.

44. Lynette McGrath provides a helpful catalog of the medieval and Renaissance images of mirroring on which Lanyer may have drawn in “Metaphoric Subversions: Feasts and Mirrors in Amelia Lanier's Salve Deus Rex Judæorum,” LIT [Literature Interpretation Theory] 3 (1991): 101-13. The mirror may also have been part of the iconography of Orpheus. See Giuseppe Scavizzi, “The Myth of Orpheus in Italian Renaissance Art,” in Orpheus: The Metamorphoses of a Myth, ed. John Warden (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1982), pp. 111-62, 153-4, n. 38.

45. Vickers, p. 278. Vickers's comment on Echo is part of a discussion about Petrarch's use of mythic representations of women's silencing.

46. Joseph Loewenstein, “Echo's Ring: Orpheus and Spenser's Career,” ELR [English Literary Renaissance] 16, 2 (Spring 1986): 287-302.

47. This study was inspired by conversations with John C. Ulreich and informed by his comments and the thoughtful responses of Meg Lota Brown, Heather Dubrow, and Naomi Miller.