SOURCE: Lamb, Mary Ellen. “Patronage and Class in Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.” In Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain, edited by Mary E. Burke, Jane Donawerth, Linda L. Dove, and Karen Nelson, pp. 38-57. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000.

Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum shows evident, even blatant, signs of its production under a patronage system: eleven prefatory dedications, the tailoring of various states of the text as presentation copies, explicit allusions to Lanyer's fall from former status, lengthy addresses to the countess of Cumberland.¹ Yet, although various critics note Lanyer's transparent bids for patronage, until recently, most discussions of the Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum have bracketed off financial motives as somehow extraneous to the work.² The notion of compensation seems to sit uncomfortably with what Robert C. Evans has called “a modern urge to enshrine the poet as a creative culture-hero, somehow set apart from and above ambition” (36).

This natural and generous impulse to idealize beloved poets is especially intense regarding women writers, whose works have been devalued and relegated to obscurity for centuries by a masculinist system. To account for Lanyer's “fulsome, self-serving flattery of potential patrons,” Elaine V. Beilin explains that the virtue Lanyer describes for them is actually designed to reveal “the ultimate reality behind the virtuous life” (Redeeming Eve, 183 and 200). Beilin and Barbara Lewalski both respond to Lanyer's flattery of women patrons by discussing a religious sincerity that is surely difficult to ascertain from the text.³ Alternatively, critics advance Lanyer's feminist principles. Susanne Woods, for example, interprets her flattery of women patrons as a feminist celebration of a “community of good women” (xxxi), and Lewalski represents her as rewriting the institution of patronage “in female terms” (Writing Women, 241). But the language of Lanyer's dedications to women was not unusually celebratory by early modern conventions, and by the early seventeenth century women patrons were a standard feature of the patriarchal system of patronage.⁴

To pass over the various self-announcements of the Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum as merely standard motions toward patronage or to read them narrowly as protofeminist celebrations is to discount a central feature of the work. As numerous materialist critics have pointed out, a failure to analyze literary works in terms of the historical moment of their production risks the anachronistic tendency of liberal humanism to dissolve historical difference by projecting generalized meanings upon texts.⁵ Scholars of early modern women writers are not exempt from these universalizing tendencies. The feminist project of recuperating women's texts lends itself to attributing modern feminist values to early modern women, to depict them as bonding together across class boundaries to resist an oppressive patriarchy. These projections are particularly tempting for the Salve, which includes a thoroughgoing critique of gender ideology in its “Eve's Apology,” but the Salve is equally thoroughgoing in its critique of class. Unlike her women dedicatees, Aemilia Lanyer was a working poet. She needed money.⁶ This asymmetrical power relationship between writer and patron emerges as a primary preoccupation of the text so that, far from erasing disparities in class, the Salve is predicated upon them.

Lanyer's expressions of ambivalence toward the wealth and power of patrons make the Salve a particularly valuable text for the study of patronage. Lanyer's work provides a timely alternative to the conservatism described by M. D. Jardine for models of patronage in both the old and new historicisms. The Salve enacts neither the “willing, idyllic sharing of values and culture … in a conflict-free society” depicted by the old historicism, nor the “power circuit, with art reduced to a ‘cash for propaganda’ level” depicted by the new historicism (287 and 290). Instead, stresses and strains in Lanyer's work expose the complexities of early modern patronage, whose origin in a feudal society set it at odds with a protocapitalistic economics.⁷ Neither patronage nor the newer market exchange system were working very well for authors in the early seventeenth century. The feudal form of patronage was fast becoming obsolete because upper-class consumption patterns were changing in the shift from a “lineage society” based on a network of kin and clients to a “civil society” based on ties to a centralized government (Stone, 100). Although some poets such as Samuel Daniel had been able to find temporary positions as tutors, aristocratic households were increasingly divesting themselves of retainers, clients, and other extrafamilial ties to retire “from the great hall to the private dining-room,” as Stone demonstrates (95). But the emerging capitalist alternative of selling books to a consumer public had not yet matured enough to support its writers. As Elizabeth Eisenstein notes, writers would remain in a “quasi-amateur status” until the copyright laws were enacted in the eighteenth century (101). Until then, authors sold their works to stationers for a onetime payment no matter how many copies were sold; sometimes unauthorized publications evaded payment of even that fee. Edwin Miller has described how both systems were strained yet further by the increasing number of authors attempting to make money from their work at this time (95-96 and 137-40).

The frustrations of appealing to both systems, neither of which were effective, provided for the Salve precisely that oppositional voice notably unremarked in both old and new historical treatments of the topic.⁸ Such oppositions to dominant discourses do not happen spontaneously. According to a theorist of culture such as Paul Smith, spaces for resistance emerge from the gaps and discrepancies existing between competing ideologies (xxxiv-xxxv). In Lanyer's case, the contradictions between feudal and protocapitalist discourses of patronage enabled her opposition to dominant class ideologies. Although Lanyer's numerous dedications to noblewomen, beginning with the queen, advertise the Salve as a book appropriate for upper-class readers, passages within these dedications point out the injustice of an economic system in which wealth is distributed by rank rather than by merit. Lanyer creates a multiple female audience in the dedications, which contradicts the meditation's depiction of the countess dowager of Cumberland as its sole reader.

Lanyer's long addresses to the countess dowager evoke the feudal role of family poet writing a work for and even about an aristocratic patron. The countess dowager is not only her sole reader, but her sole subject of writing:

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

(113)

The sheer excessiveness of Lanyer's assertion that God Himself charged the author, at her birth, to devote her life to representing the countess's virtue moves beyond traditional bonds of service to verge on parody of the inflated rhetoric of patronage. This assertion of a lifetime commitment, however unlikely, suggests that Lanyer was soliciting a position within the household either of the countess dowager or of her daughter Anne. This bid for employment was not necessarily confined to writing, for sustained patronage often took the form of household service rather than long-term hospitality. From medieval estates to the countess of Pembroke's country house, writers were often employed in other capacities—as tutors, as chaplains, as personal attendants.⁹ Allusions within the text reveal that Lanyer had already served in the countess dowager's household, possibly as an attendant or caregiver for the young Anne, in whose sports she “did alwaies beare a part” (135). The grief Lanyer expresses that she can no longer “dayly see” the countess's daughter Anne, recently married to the wealthy earl of Dorset, implies a specific desire to become a member of this newly formed household:¹⁰

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

(134)

The resolution of Lanyer's grief is obvious, and Anne has the power to confer it.

The prefatory dedications operated according to a less feudal system of patronage newly made possible by the availability of printed copies that Lanyer could present to a number of dedicatees, any or all of whom might remunerate the author with a onetime stipend.¹¹ The “Authors Dreame to the Ladie Marie, the Countesse Dowager of Pembrooke” explicitly sets the scene for such an act: waking from an elaborate dream glorifying the countess for her translation of the Psalms, the author is moved to present to her “the fruits of idle hours” (30). Although Lanyer was well acquainted with the countess dowager of Kent, “the mistress of my youth” (18), others she had never met, as she confesses freely in her dedication to the countess of Suffolke: “It may seem right strange, / That I a stranger should presume thus farre, / To write to you” (36). Dedicating works to strangers was a new phenomenon in the early modern period. According to Edwin Miller, “The medieval lord had never found on his threshold an unknown man with a recently printed book replete with effusive dedications—and a hand outstretched” (95). This common practice of multiple presentation copies shows how the printing press worked to loosen bonds between writer and patron. In some cases, authors never intended to present their works to specific patrons at all because dedications served to advertise the worth of a book to the general public (Miller, 130).

Lanyer's multiple dedications to aristocratic women thus not only functioned according to a loosened form of patronage, but also provided an early modern form of celebrity endorsement to sell books to anonymous consumers within the capitalistic system of market exchange. The opportunities and difficulties posed by this faceless audience for Lanyer's work appear in the contradictory representations of that audience in her two dedications to it. Her verse epistle “To all vertuous Ladies in generall” appeals to a consumer mentality invested in advancing or affirming its high location in class. Her much less conventional prose letter “To the Vertuous Reader” appeals to a feminist or protofeminist consciousness that does not rely on class consciousness. Thus, the very anonymity of these women consumers of printed books empowered Lanyer to imagine them in varying terms according to her own predictions or desires. Although buyers and readers were not yet numerous enough to support writers, the fact that they existed at all created a site of resistance that enabled Lanyer's critique of the class hierarchy underlying patronage.¹²

Lanyer's verse epistle “To all vertuous Ladies in generall” constructs the reading of the Salve as enacting high worldly, intellectual, and spiritual class or status. First, by reading (and presumably buying) the Salve, anyone could become the personal companion of Queen Anne: “Let this faire Queene not unattended bee” (12). This allusion to the immediately preceding dedications to Queen Anne and her daughter creates an additional function for prefatory dedications as a form of advertising by placing typically middle-class readers vicariously within the glittering social register of the time. The epistle then constructs reading the Salve as a sign of intellectual status, also depicted in terms of class, by inviting readers to “let muses your companions be, those sacred sisters that on Pallas wait.” Finally, by seeking out Christ, readers become “in the eie of heaven so highly placed, / That others by your virtues may be graced” (15). With this high rank, readers have attained the power to patronize or “grace this little Booke” of Lanyer's. Employing such terms as “so highly placed” and “grace” to represent rank in heaven, the poem appeals to a language of class that simultaneously reifies worldly status (for those who have it) and subverts it (for those who don't).

The prose letter to “To the Vertuous Reader” constructs an alternative audience for the printed book and an alternative representation of the Salve itself. Mentioned only in the dedication to Queen Anne, the defense of women in “Eve's Apology” now becomes the central point of the Salve. In this dedication, rather than high birth, successful aggression toward men creates status for women. Angered by the wrongs done by men to women, God has sent “wise and virtuous women” to bring men down—women such as Deborah, Jael, Hester, Judith, and Susanna. Status is also conferred by a relationship with Jesus, who was born of a woman, who healed women, who appeared to a woman after his death. The striking absence of almost all allusions to patronage, to class, to Lanyer's financial need, or to the possible “gracing” of her book by its readers creates an egalitarian relationship with her buyer-reader, constructed as believing feminist principles. This buyer-reader was not apparently compatible with the usual aristocratic woman patron. As Tina Krontiris has pointed out, this prose letter and four dedications were removed when the book was reissued, apparently because its feminist statements offended its aristocratic dedicatees (120). The letter's construction of a feminist audience for the Salve suggests that the radical interrogation of gender in “Eve's Apology” was enabled by the buyer-reader of a protocapitalist print culture.

Although buyers and readers were not yet numerous enough to support writers, their very existence created a site of resistance that enabled Lanyer's critique of the class hierarchy in her prefatory dedications to individual patrons. This resistance was waged primarily by means of a religious discourse able to level social distinctions. Lanyer's devotional constructions of reading engage in what Evans has called a series of “micropolitical performances” (29), struggles for personal mastery that often play upon the insecurities of prospective patrons. As Wendy Wall has noted, the dedication's plea to Arbella Stuart only to “spare one looke / Upon this humbled King” constructs the Salve as the body of Christ: to refuse to accept and read this work would be to refuse Christ himself.¹³ Similarly, the dedication to the countess of Bedford constructs the reading of the Salve as letting Christ into her heart, to “entertaine this dying lover” (33). Who would dare to shut Him out? For “vertuous Ladies” and the countess of Dorset, reading the Salve would mean filling their lamps with oil to be ready, like the wise virgins, for the Bridegroom (12 and 41). Who would risk being a foolish virgin, arriving at the marriage feast only to find the door of the kingdom of heaven shut? These representations of the act of reading imply a spiritual threat to those who do not read the Salve intensely, participating fully in its meditation on Christ's passion.

These devotional constructions of reading unsettle the asymmetrical relationship between needy author and wealthy patron. There is also perhaps something in the act of reading itself that unsettles this power relationship inherent in patronage. In the actual experience of reading, an author's words typically assume an authority, even if only a temporary one, over a reader's thoughts, ordering and directing them to the author's will. This relationship of intellectual authority is diametrically opposed to the author's social experience of patronage—as enacted, for example, in the act of kneeling before a patron to present a book.¹⁴ Lanyer's justification of her authorship in terms of the temporary and acceptable authority of a hostess encompasses the radically unstable nature of the author's role. As Lanyer welcomes several of her readers—Queen Anne, Princess Elizabeth, the countess dowagers of Kent and Pembroke, and the countess of Dorset—to her feast (book), she offers them wholesome heavenly food. But what is her role as she invites the queen to feed upon the “paschal Lamb” she has prepared as a “pretious Passeover” (7)? Is she a lowly cook, or does her invitation assume the authority of a priest's officiation at a holy communion or mass?¹⁵ This oscillation between divergent roles reflects the complexities of the author-reader relationship.

In this context, it is striking that one of Lanyer's first critiques of class occurs in the imagined scene of the presentation of the Salve to Queen Anne. As her dedication explicitly states, such a scene never in fact occurred, for Lanyer had been barred by “meannesse” from Queen Anne's throne. As her proxy, then, Virtue performs the actions of a poor presenter of a book to the queen:

This holy worke, Virtue presents to you,
In poore apparell, shaming to be seene,
Or once t'appeare in you[r] judiciall view:
But that fair Virtue, though in meane attire,
All Princes of the world doe most desire.

(6)

In this version of a Cinderella story, Virtue's “meane attire” does not prevent “all Princes of the world” from perceiving her worth. Why then could not Queen Anne perceive the author's worth, similarly obscured by the “meanness” of her position in class? Within this depiction of the deference of Virtue, “shaming to be seene,” lurks a protest against the queen's evidently shabby treatment of the author, whose value, like Virtue's, cannot be measured by her clothes.

Lanyer extends this disparity between social class and “true” worth by drawing on conservative devotional discourse to destabilize wealth as a reliable signifier of class. In the reference to the “Monarch whose dayes were spent in poverty and sorrow / And yet all Kings their Wealth of him do borrow,” the implied threat in the term “borrow” darkens the representation of the queen's own wealth. Whereas monarchs, presumably including Queen Anne, may someday have to pay back the monies they have borrowed, Lanyer is debt free, and her heavenly finances remain sound. Her “real” rank is much higher than her worldly one:

Yea in his kingdome onely rests my lands,
Of honour there I hope I shall not misse:
Though I on earth doe live unfortunate.

(6)

Within the discourse of patronage, an author's assertions of need are never without point. It is up to the queen, this passage implies, to narrow the discrepancy.

Lanyer's most radical challenge to the class system comes, however, in her dedication to the countess of Dorset, to whom she writes “as God's Steward” (43), inverting the traditional assertion that class reveals the innate virtu of aristocrats, whose illustrious ancestors bequeathed them worth as well as rank (Whigham, Ambition, 73-82). She thus asserts, on the contrary, that class is not innate at all, but must be newly constructed in each generation. She thus moves beyond a traditional emphasis upon external show as the enactment of class to align herself with popular protest by claiming the common ancestry of all people.¹⁶ As Woods notes in her introduction to Lanyer's poems, this claim echoes the rhyme “When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?” (40) chanted in popular uprisings:¹⁷ “All sprang but from one woman and one man, / Then how doth Gentry come to rise and fall?” (42). Even more radically, Lanyer suggests that unworthy descendants may in fact be illegitimate somewhere along the line:

Whose successors, although they beare his name,
Possessing not the riches of his minde,
Howe doe we know they spring out of the same
True stocke of honour, beeing not of that kind?

(43)

Lanyer's personal situation gave this argument special point. Her own son, the illegitimate child of Lord Hundson, did not receive riches or honors from his noble blood but was instead reared as the ordinary child of a musician, Alphonso Lanyer. From this perspective, class hierarchy became highly contingent not on blood lineage but on social convention.¹⁸

Lanyer uses this issue to appeal for patronage by proposing that worth (and therefore legitimacy) may best be proven by good stewardship that “must for all the poore provide.” Moreover, she addresses Anne specifically as a steward: “To you, as to Gods Steward I doe write,” as she advises her to “shew from whence you are descended” by bestowing her wealth worthily: “Succour the poore, comfort the comfortlesse, / Cherish faire plants, suppresse unwholsom weeds” (44).

Pleading for patronage was a tricky rhetorical task; outright requests were demeaning for patron and supplicant alike. But Lanyer comes perhaps as close as possible to such a request when she states the significance of Anne's demonstration of her worth (and legitimacy) through her stewardship, presumably especially for Lanyer's Salve: “So shal you shew from whence you are descended, / And leave to all posterities your fame” (44).

Why did Lanyer choose this dedication to the countess of Dorset in which to voice these radical ideas? What possible reading strategies did she assume? Did she have reason to believe that the countess, embroiled in her own suits to inherit lands, would agree with her? The hierarchical and extremely class-conscious view of the world that emerges from the countess's later diaries suggest the unlikelihood of such sympathy.¹⁹ Lewalski's supposition that Lanyer behaved as if “privileged to do so by former familiarity” (Women Writing, 224) seems more probable. As Lewalski notes (239), Lanyer was twenty years older than Anne Clifford when she “did alwaies beare a part” in “Dorset's former sports.” Did Lanyer assume for her authorship the authority she may have exercised over Anne Clifford as her tutor or caregiver? Did Lanyer's early contact with Clifford as a very young girl decrease her sense of the deference owed to her? If Lanyer were in fact bidding for employment in Dorset's household, as the “Description of Cooke-ham” would suggest, then she took some significant risks in her placement of this critique of class.

The religious discourse that unsettles class ideology in the dedicatory epistles also surfaces within the meditation itself. Lanyer first seems to endorse this class structure in her claim that Jesus suffered even more than others because of his aristocratic nature:

Yet, had he beene but of a meane degree,
His sufferings had beene small to what they were;
Meane minds will shew of what meane mouldes they bee;
Small griefes seeme great, yet Use doth make them beare.

(104)

Yet Christ was “A seeming Trades-mans sonne, of none attended, / Save of a few in poverty and need; / Poore Fishermen” (124). Lanyer portrays the countess's love as superseding apparent class difference when her “heart doth rise” at Christ's appearance as a “good old man” in a “Shepherds weed” (109). She depicts the countess's ministrations to Christ as “sometime imprison'd, naked, poore, and bare / Full of diseases, impotent, and lame” (109). Krontiris's insight that this passage allowed Lanyer to solicit “economic support for herself” (110) gains further force through the allusion to Christ's promise of a heavenly reward for those who fed him when he was hungry, clothed him when he was naked, and visited him when he was sick or in prison. In Matthew 25, a threat accompanies this promise: those who do not tend to the needs of the poor (the latter perhaps including Lanyer) depart into “everlasting fire” (Geneva Bible, Matt. 25:40-41).

Passages such as this one render Lanyer's relationship of authority to her patron-reader deeply ambiguous. On the one hand, Lanyer continually defers to the countess as her sole reader. Her choice of genre itself apparently represents a response to the countess's habit of meditating on the grounds of her estate, “placing his holy writ in some faire tree, / To meditate” (133). On the other hand, her authorship of a meditation creates her as a kind of a spiritual advisor, for the meditation, perhaps more than any other genre, is designed to order the thoughts of readers toward specific ends, to attain specific spiritual fruits (Martz, 14 and 32). As was traditional for meditations on the passion (Martz, 33), the Salve is meant to enliven religious devotion by eliciting sorrow for Christ's suffering from the time of his capture at Gethsemene to his crucifixion. For this meditation to work, the countess must engage in an especially intense practice of reading specific to techniques of meditation. The goal, finally, of this text is nothing less than absolute absorption—the internalization of Christ's image in the countess's heart so that she herself becomes a shrine:

Therefore (good Madame) in your heart I leave
His perfect picture, where it shall stand,
Deeply engraved in that holy shrine,
Environed with Love and Thoughts divine.

(108)

To achieve this purpose, Lanyer relies heavily on a common meditative technique of composition in which the reader is made to be imaginatively present at scriptural scenes (Martz, 30). She addresses various characters—by empathizing with Jesus as he is arrested (“But greater horror to thy Soule must rise, / Than Heart can thinke, or any Wit devise” [71]) or by mourning with the Virgin Mary at the crucifixion (“How canst thou choose [faire Virgin] then but mourne” [99]). The narrator models appropriate responses herself by crying out, “Oh hatefull houre! oh blest! oh cursed day!” (72) as the soldiers arrive to capture Jesus at Gethsemene. The daughters of Jerusalem also provide a pattern for practitioners. Watching Christ stagger past as he bears His cross, they weep and cry out, and He turns His head to comfort them. The narrator addresses them as “most blessed daughters of Jerusalem / Who found such favour in your Saviors sight, / To turne his face when you did pitie him” (93). The blessing achieved by these women spectators is the blessing offered by this meditation to any readers who achieve an intense feeling of compassion. A receptive reading confers grace.

The disruptive nature of “Eve's Apology” within this conventional English meditation must not be underestimated. It both critiques gender relations and also validates women's anger. Making herself imaginatively present at Christ's trials, the narrator feels such grief at Christ's pain that she is led to inveigh against his persecutors. She accuses Caiphas, for example, in this way: “Thou rend'st thy cloathes, in stead of thy false heart” (82). Usually presented as a narrative of the redemption of sinners of both sexes through Christ's love, Salve rereads the passion as a narrative of gender relations—of continuing and characteristic male cruelty to Christ and other innocent victims, especially women.²⁰ Lanyer's new version of the passion is a static narrative; there is no change or redemption. In its gender arrangements, the present day remains frozen in the events of Christ's passion. The cruelty of men is unredeemed because male tyranny continues to dominate women in Lanyer's time. Because women did not participate in the crucifixion of Christ, they were not implicated in its sin. They require no redemption because, in their grief, they attempted to prevent it from occurring at all.

Lanyer's retelling of Christ's passion justifies not only women's anger, but also their words. Pilate's sin of condemning Jesus was part of another sin—that of not listening to his wife. The narrator pleads, “But heare the words of thy most worthy wife” (84). This blame represents a powerful counterargument to a prominent reading of the Eve story—by William Whateley's Bride-Bush, for example—as a narrative of the disastrous consequences of endowing women's words with authority (sig. CC4^v). Lanyer retells the Pilate incident to argue that, on the contrary, Pilate's refusal to listen to his wife was a primary cause of the crucifixion. Like Whateley, Lanyer generalizes this domestic incident to refer to all men and women: “(Poore soules) we [women] never gave consent” to the crucifixion: “Witnesse thy wife (O Pilate) speakes for all” (87). Addressed in its entirety to Pilate who stands for all tyrannical men, this apology for Eve—deceived by cunning and moved by “too much love” (86) for her husband—culminates in an argument for marital equality: “Your fault beeing greater, why should you disdaine / Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny?” (87).

This radical retelling of the passion story as a tale of domestic tyranny is not limited to the few pages labeled “Eve's Apology.” It also plays an important part in Lanyer's construction of the countess of Cumberland as a reader. Beneath the devotional meditative role offered the countess emerges the subtext of her own domestic martyrdom to a dashing husband who had deserted her for various and notorious affairs at court. The countess's withdrawal into the country revealed her rejection of worldly pleasures (58) but also signified her unhappy separation from her husband.²¹ Lanyer's comparison of the countess with Matilda, who served Christ as the true spouse of her soul (61), in turn evokes another comparison with the countess's flagrantly untrue spouse of her body. Lanyer's praise of the countess as even more heroic than Deborah and Judith in her battle against sin everyday (114-15) sanctifies her emotional duress. According to Lanyer's narrator, the countess approaches martyrdom in her innocent suffering: “Loe Madame, heere you take a view of those [martyrs], / Whose worthy steps you desire to tread” (128). Most relevant to the countess's domestic difficulties are the excoriations of Antony's mistress Cleopatra as she is informed in three stanzas of personal address that her inner beauty cannot compare to the countess's (112-13). A natural analogue for the Other Women who attracted the countess's unfaithful husband, Cleopatra also appears prominently near the beginning of the Salve in “An Invective against outward beuty unaccompanied with virtue” (59-60). These passages offer “equipment for living”²² to a countess whose “perfit features” resided in “a fading face” (59).

By superimposing a narrative of domestic martyrdom on a meditation of Christ's passion, Lanyer enacts the feudal role of a family poet, addressing the family issues of her patron. This role exists in tension with the authorial power as spiritual guide produced for her in the act of writing a meditation. Writing in the role of family poet, Lanyer inevitably permitted the countess's anticipated reading of the Salve to shape her treatment of the topic. A brief apology near the beginning of the Salve suggests that even as she complied with the countess's wishes, she contested her patron's power over her authorship. Ruffling the smooth surface of deference, this apology presents the meditation as a substitute for what the countess dowager of Cumberland had already requested:

And pardon (Madame) though I do not write
Those praisefull lines of that delightful place,
As you commaunded me in that faire night,
When shining Phoebe gave so great a grace.

(51-52)

If Cookeham was indeed this “delightful place,” then the Salve demonstrates its eventual conformity to the countess's desires with the “Description of Cooke-ham” appended to the meditation. The earlier apology is then rendered oddly unnecessary when, in the appended poem, the meditation is represented as having been written specifically at the countess's request: “from whose desires did spring this worke of Grace” (130). The only function of this apology seems to be to record Lanyer's power to resist the countess's commands even as she obeys them. This assertion of an independent subjectivity, however lightly sketched in, signals Lanyer's resistance to the feudal ideology forming the basis for the traditional patron-author relationship.

Alluding to her resistance to the countess's initial request would not seem to be in the best interests of a poet bidding for patronage. Other passages, especially her discussion of illegitimacy in the dedication to the countess of Dorset, suggest that her search for patronage was not consistently rational. Competing issues of class and dominance apparently got in the way. Patronage was, in the early seventeenth century, an emotionally fraught topic. Although many twentieth-century discussions tend to treat patronage as a form of compensation, to early modern writers it was much more. As Evans has noted, this system was built “on expectation and apprehension, on the deepest hopes and fears,” and involved “more than how writers were paid; it involved … how they lived their lives” (23, 25). Most writers remained unsuccessful in finding sustained literary patronage, but patronage somehow remained a central social construct arranging relations of power throughout early modern culture.²³ Central to this construct was the ideal of service, according to which subordinates—servants, wives, supplicants of any kind—voluntarily offered their labor to the figures of authority to whom it was naturally owed. This model of interaction moved into emotional spaces seemingly removed from public power. As John Barrell has astutely pointed out, relations of patronage, including literary patronage, were commonly represented in terms of love (25). More than representations may be at stake. Coppélia Kahn's analysis of patronage in terms of the “infantile dependence on the mother who, it seems to the child, can give or take all away” invests this interaction with deeply psychological roots.²⁴

Lanyer's “Description of Cooke-ham” appeared at a liminal point. Although patronage remained a widespread and powerful model of negotiating hierarchical relationships, it was also experiencing considerable strain: in thirty years, a civil war would renounce this ideal of natural service by cutting off the king's head. A contributing cause to this event, according to M. D. Jardine, was the rising capitalistic economy, through which labor was bought and sold according to a perceived motive of self-interest rather than of service (301-2). The inconsistencies within and between the Salve and its dedications point to the ideological contradictions fissuring the text at a time when writing, like other forms of labor, was also positioned between these competing social formations. “The Description of Cooke-ham” explores the emotional contradictions of patronage as a system that extended far beyond mere compensation to a mode of feeling. In the process, it provides insights into the “discrepancies between the celebrated service ideal … and the conditions of servility which it concealed,” as Jardine has noted, at a time when divergent concepts of the service ideal and patronage system were most apparent (295). Recapitulating the language and gestures as well as the frustrations and anxieties of service, this “last farewell” to Cooke-ham (138) not only expresses the emotional contradictions inherent in patronage, but also mourns its loss.

As part of her bid for patronage in the household of either the countess dowager of Cumberland or her daughter, Lanyer projects the experience of service onto the landscape and creatures of Cooke-ham so that her pleasure in the company of the young Anne Clifford and her expressed pain at its subsequent loss structures the “Description” as a whole. This projection is most explicit in the treatment of the nightingale Philomela, whose identification with the poet is made most evident in the similarity of their literary tasks, which are even described in the same words: “Philomela with her sundry leyes, / Both you and that delightfull Place did praise” (131) echoes Lanyer's description of the countess's demand to write “those praisefull lines of that delightfull place” (51).²⁵ Once the countesses (and their patronage) depart, Philomela's song is silenced—“Faire Philomela leaves her mournefull Ditty, / Drownd in dead sleepe, yet can procure no pittie” (137-38)—and so, it is implied, will be Lanyer's poetry, unless she procures the “pittie” of a countess. The other creatures of Cookeham experience the same heightened emotions conventional to representations of patronage. The birds, flowers, trees, streams, and hills—all express in their own ways Lanyer's “reverend Love” in the joy they experience in the company of the countess dowager and her daughter; they, too, are inconsolable when the countesses depart.

The emotionally overwrought flowers and trees of Cookeham represent a literalization of the gardening metaphor in Lanyer's prefatory dedication to Anne, advising her to show her stewardship (or patronage) by cherishing “faire plants” and suppressing “unwholsom weeds” (44). This metaphor was implicitly tied to patronage by the early modern usage of the word “plant” to mean “to set up a person or thing in some person or estate” (OED). Like the streams and the birds, the flowers and the trees share a goal: to please the countess of Cumberland and her daughter. Explicitly described as servants, the “walkes put on their summer Liveries” (131). The trees turn themselves into canopies to shade the eyes of the countess dowager. The hills imitate the gallant gesture attributed to Raleigh, who supposedly spread his cloak in the mud for the queen to step on:

The very Hills right humbly did descend,
When you to treat upon them did intend.
And as you set your feete, they still did rise,
Glad that they could receive so rich a prise.

(131)

These same hills strike the humble posture of a suitor as they kneel before the countess of Cumberland:

Where beeing seated, you might plainely see,
Hills, vales, and woods, as if on bended knee
They had appeared, your honour to salute,
Or to preferre some strange unlook'd for sute.

(133)

None of these actions can be dismissed as simple flattery, empty gestures, or even poetic whimsy. Instead, they represent, in Frank Whigham's terms, “repeatable assertions of relation,” necessary to maintain the “class-stratified patronage system” that organized power and privilege in early modern England (“Rhetoric,” 864 and 867). These small gestures of deference from plants enact the large gesture of deference that is the “Description of Cooke-ham” and even the Salve itself. Such gracefully humble demeanor both confirms the class status of its recipient and provides for suitors and writers alike a rhetorical power that attests to their gentility and therefore to their suitability for employment. Drawing from a “feudal vocabulary of personal service” (Whigham, “Rhetoric,” 873), these exaggerated assertions of a desire to please were designed to assure noble employers that interactions in the limited space of a country estate would be easy and pleasant.

Not all of the creatures at Cookeham experience unmitigated joy in the presence of the countess dowager and her daughter, however, and these exceptions hint at a dark side of patronage. With the word “attend” invoking the language of service, the especially anxious need of the birds to gain the countesses' approval suggests the asymmetries of a patronage relationship: “The pretty Birds would oft come to attend thee, / Yet flie away for feare they should offend thee” (132). The patron's power is not merely imaginary. Small animals first wish to display themselves by playing in her sight, but then they cease their games in fear as the countess wields a bow, ready to inflict real damage:

The little creatures in the Burrough by
Would come abroad to sport them in your eye;
Yet fearfull of the Bowe in your faire Hand,
Would run away when you did make a stand.

(132)

Lanyer describes herself as taking part in Anne Clifford's “sports”; they no doubt also “sported” under the countess dowager's eye. The echo of this word and of the activity it represents perhaps suggests a fear that such games were in some sense dangerous, possibly because they might incur the countess's disapproval.

Perhaps the worst aspect of patronage, however, was its undependability. Patrons could let employers (and writers) go, and as in the case of the countess dowager and her daughter, they could go themselves. As they depart, the “Description” depicts the countess of Cumberland and her daughter as treating the creatures, both vegetable and animal, as soon-to-be unemployed servants,

requiting each according to their kind,
Forgetting not to turne and take your leave
Of these sad creatures, powreless to receive
Your favour when with griefe you did depart.

(136)

The mourning of the plants produces winterlike effects. Trees lose their leaves, and they also weep, “letting their teares in your faire bosoms fall / As if they said, Why will ye leave us all?” (136). The briers and brambles “caught fast your clothes, thinking to make you stay” (138). Although these operatic excesses cannot be taken at face value, their implications for the experience of patronage cannot be ignored. Like plants, poets in service are not invested with the rights to make explicit demands; they can only weep or gesture. Like plants, they are powerless to affect the actions of their patrons, even when these actions have devastating effects on them. Barrell's observation that the discourse of patronage often uses relations of love to “purify and idealise what was always of course an economic transaction” (25) may be only partly true. As anyone unemployed for a length of time can witness, a lack of work can feel like an absence of love; this irrational conflation of love and employment was all the more likely to occur in a feudal system, in which service was depicted as voluntary.

The odd resonances given to the word “chaines” by its placement at the very end of the “Description” gathers together the ambivalences of this complicated poem in a complicated work. Making her own farewell to Cookeham, the author presents her work as commissioned by the countess of Cumberland and then expresses her never-dying devotion to both countesses:

This last farewell to Cooke-ham here I give,
When I have perform'd her noble hest,
Whose virtues lodge in my unworthy breast,
And ever shall, so long as life remains,
Tying my heart to her by those rich chaines.

On one level, “chaines” certainly can be read, according to editor Susanne Woods's gloss, as chains of the countess's virtues. But “tying” can also modify “I” instead of “virtues.” This grammatical construction releases other possible meanings for “chaines.” Its meaning as a “bond of union or sympathy” (OED) is consistent with representations of patronage in terms of love. Its meaning as a sign of office is supported by the discourse of service: the poet has been and hopes to be invested with such a “rich” chain.

All three meanings are simultaneously possible, but a fourth meaning for “chaines” as “bond or fetter” is most evocative of the Salve's oppositions to the power relationships structuring patronage.²⁶ The adjective “rich” suggests that these fetters are based on money so that “rich chaines” thus devalues the ideal of voluntary service by constructing the poet's bond with the countess dowager as based on remuneration or on hopes for remuneration. This image describes the countess's dominance, based on money, as a constraining fetter rather than as a basis of union. The agency ascribed to the poet “I” in tying her own heart to the countess presents her entry into a patronage relationship as freely chosen rather than as “natural” or ordained by God. This perspective on the patronage relationship was possible for Lanyer because she lived at a time when she could move outside the ideology of service to a capitalistic mode of construing the connection between patron and writer. Yet she may not have been able to abandon the ideology entirely. Although the printing press had provided Lanyer with an alternative way of thinking about patronage, it had not yet provided the financial means by which she could let it go. The sense of loss conveyed by the “Description of Cooke-ham” over the departure of her two women patrons suggests that even if Lanyer could have supported herself through selling her books, the feudal model for interactions, however constraining, still possessed emotional power for her. She might struggle to subvert her power, but she would remain tied to a patron “so long as life remains.”

Notes

1. All citations are taken from Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, ed. Susanne Woods. For individual versions see Woods's “Textual Introduction” (xlii-li) discussed further in Tina Krontiris, Oppositional Voices, 120. Lanyer alludes to her fall from status under Elizabeth in her dedication to Queen Anne (8). I regret that the excellent essays in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman, appeared too late to shape my argument; I can only acknowledge some of them in my notes.

2. Krontiris engages most directly with Lanyer's use of the dedications and the Salve as a way of making money (Oppositional Voices, 102-20). Various critics dismiss Lanyer's poem for its financial motive: see Muriel Bradbrook's review of Paradise of Women, ed. Betty Travitsky, 92; and A. L. Rowse, Introduction to Poems of Shakespeare's Dark Lady, 33, who explains the supposedly “stony silence” with which her dedicatees greeted Lanyer's book as caused by the “too obviously sycophantic poems.” Betty Travitsky, in Paradise of Women, notes that Lanyer's “obsequiousness is obvious” for “she had to flatter for favors” (92). More recently, critics have begun to consider her patronage more seriously as a topic. Recent essays contrast the discursive positions of Lanyer and Ben Jonson in a patriarchal patronage system: Ann Baynes Coiro, 357-76; and Susanne Woods, “Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson,” 15-20, and also “Vocation and Authority: Born to Write,” 83-98; Leeds Barroll. See also a discussion of Lanyer's use of religion to undercut the class status of the patronage system in McBride, 60-82.

3. Beilin, Redeeming Eve, 188; Barbara Lewalski assures readers that Lanyer “appears to have been sincerely, if not very profoundly, religious” (Writing Women, 219).

4. Strains especially from class difference within this “community of women” are, however, ably discussed by Coiro and Schnell. Krontiris describes the language of Lanyer's dedications as an “institutionalized language shaped by and for men” (Oppositional Voices, 108). For dedications addressed to women, see Franklin Williams, Index, 5, 94 and 211. Edwin Haviland Miller points out that beginning with the countess of Pembroke, both major and minor poets were commonly “mothered” by female patrons (45); see also Brennan, Literary Patronage, 7.

5. John Barrell, 1-7; Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, foreword to Political Shakespeare; Catherine Belsey, Subject of Tragedy, 1-10; Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt, Introduction to Feminist Criticism, xv-xxxix; Valerie Wayne, Introduction to Matter of Difference, 1-27. See also Herz for Lanyer's nonconformance with dominant feminist narratives of women writers.

6. Lewalski, among others, discusses Lanyer's visit to the astrologer Simon Forman, in which she expresses anger at her reduced circumstances (Writing Women, 215); her husband had apparently squandered the money she had received from Hunsdon. Later, in 1620, a chancery suit mentions that “she … for her maynetaynaunce and releefe was compelled to teach and educate the children of divers persons of worth and understandinge” (Lewalski, Writing Women, 217). After the composition of the Salve, she kept a school from 1616 to 1619 (Lewalski, 218).

7. Arthur Marotti, “Patronage, Poetry,” 1-26, discusses this change; Edwin Miller claims that “by 1600 patronage like many other medieval institutions was obsolescent, but this fact was not to be widely recognized for almost another century and a half” (94).

8. M. D. Jardine, 298; see also Krontiris, 105.

9. K. J. Holzknecht, 179-86; Mary Ellen Lamb, “Countess of Pembroke's Patronage,” 207-26.

10. The Salve was entered in the Stationers' Register on October 2, 1610 (Lanyer, ed. Woods, xxv); Anne Clifford married the earl of Dorset in 1609 (Lewalski, Writing Women, 127-28).

11. Miller discusses presentation copies and their abuses and effects (110-29); according to the records of one Richard Robinson, the average remuneration was £2 (126).

12. Patricia Thomson, “The Literature of Patronage,” 267-84, describes how the “desire to be free from patronage arose before the public could be relied on” (282). See also Marotti, “Patronage, Poetry,” 2 and 25.

13. Wendy Wall, Imprint of Gender, 324; Krontiris has also made this point (Oppositional Voices, 110), and it is well discussed in McBride.

14. Werner Gundersheimer, “Patronage in the Renaissance,” 15-16. The frontispiece of the Huntington Library copy of Caxton's Hystoryes of Troye portrays the author kneeling before his patron, the duchess of Burgundy.

15. McGrath, 104, assumes the latter, as does McBride.

16. Elias, Court Society; see also Howard Kaminsky, “Estate, Nobility,” 684-709.

17. Lewalski discusses these “radical egalitarian conclusions” in terms of a female succession grounded on “virtue and holiness” (Writing Women, 225).

18. Lewalski, Writing Women, 214-15; Rowse also relates this passage to the illegitimacy of Lanyer's own son, calling it “sour grapes” (23).

19. Lewalski, Writing Women, 130-40; the later diaries are discussed in Mary Ellen Lamb, “Agency of the Split Subject,” 347-68.

20. This point has been made by various critics, such as Wall, Imprint, 320; Krontiris, Oppositional Voices, 116-18; Mueller, “Feminist Poetics,” 101; and Miller, “(M)other tongues,” 159.

21. Lewalski points out that Cookeham was a royal manor owned by the countess of Cumberland's brother (Writing Women, 396); and that she probably retired there when she separated from her husband. For his notorious affairs, see 127.

22. The phrase is Kenneth Burke's, from “Literature as Equipment for Living,” in Philosophy of Literary Form, 293. The prominence of these allusions to Cleopatra has been noted by Beilin, who supposes that she represented a fantasy of worldly power (Redeeming Eve, 200); and by Rowse, who supposes that Lanyer imagined herself a type of Cleopatra (29).

23. For the centrality of patronage as a social and psychological construct, see, for example, Gundersheimer; Frank Whigham, “Rhetoric,” 864-82; M. D. Jardine; and Evans, 23-30.

24. Kahn, “‘Magic of Bounty,’” 57.

25. For a discussion of nightingales as a common figure for early modern women poets, see Mary Ellen Lamb, “Singing with the (Tongue) of the Nightingale,” in Gender and Authorship, 194-230.

26. Coiro discusses how women were “bound by rich chains of marriage, or service” (373); Holmes reads them as “Platonic love” (183); Berry asks if it is necessary to choose whether these chains are motivated by heaven or profit (224). Mary Sidney uses chains to signify pride in her translation of Psalm 73, ll. 16-18, as discussed in Margaret Hannay's essay in this collection.