SOURCE: Staub, Susan C. “The Lady Frances Did Watch: Gascoigne's Voyeuristic Narrative.” In Framing Elizabethan Fictions: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Narrative Prose, edited by Constance C. Relihan, pp. 41-54. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Staub explores how voyeurism in the The Adventures of Master F. J. offers insights on gender roles of the Elizabethan era.]

One of the most crucial scenes for an understanding of the complexities of George Gascoigne's Adventures of Master F. J. (1573) has been virtually ignored by scholars. This scene occurs fairly early in the narrative, shortly after the hero, the courtier-poet F. J., has successfully bedded his mistress, the Lady Elinor. “Content to accept boards [the floor] for a bed of down,” the two “beguile the night,” as another figure, Elinor's kinswoman, Frances, lurks in the shadows: “not much perceived, yet the Lady Frances being no less desirous to see an issue of these enterprises, then F. J. was willing to cover them in secrecy, did watch, and even at the entrance of [F. J.'s] chamber door, perceived the point of his naked sword glistering under the skirt of his nightgown: wherat she smiled and said to herself, this gear goeth well about.”¹ By having a woman watch the object of her desire make love to another woman (Frances is in love with F. J., who has apparently been brought to the castle as a suitable match for her), Gascoigne puts a woman in the place usually occupied by the male poet-lover. In the more conventional love triangle, the male poet sees his mistress in the arms of a rival. As I will show, Frances's intrusion in this scene begins to undermine Gascoigne's carefully constructed male readership and effectively inverts the power relations implied in the commonplace masculine spectator/feminine spectacle paradigm. Thus he deprivileges the male gendered gaze, creating a site of potential gender anxiety.

Early modern literature is filled with scenes of characters secretly watching other characters in private moments—making love, bathing, undressing, sleeping, even praying. Although not always, typically the spectator is male, the spectacle female. The spectator observes from a safe distance, deriving pleasure and knowledge from his look. Voyeuristic sight, then, would seem to be a gendered activity, intimately connected with issues of power and control. As John Berger portrays it, “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”² But how do we account for instances such as this one when women look and derive pleasure from that look?

The act of seeing for both men and women seems far more complicated than Berger's analysis reveals, as the many retellings of the Orpheus story suggest.³ Voyeuristic looking may elicit a guilty pleasure, yet such an act is also fraught with anxiety. Nonetheless, although there were prohibitions against men's looking (and many a cautionary tale to illustrate the dangers of such looking), far more of the prescriptive literature deals with the curtailing of female sight. Woman's vision is particularly disruptive and threatening and must be carefully regulated. Gascoigne's portrayal of Frances vividly depicts this threat.

The scene continues with Frances's reaction to what she has witnessed. Although unmarried and thus presumably sexually uninitiated, Frances takes a prurient delight in the sexual intrigues of the household. “Tickled in all the veins” as she spies the tip of F. J.'s “naked sword glistering under the skirt of his nightgown,” she decides to play a trick on him by stealing his sword as he sleeps. The obvious connection between the sword and the penis strikingly betrays the anxiety female sight—and hence power—evoked. In this instance, because Frances steals F. J.'s sword—a clear symbol of male prowess and sexuality—sight is linked with castration. In fact, psychoanalytic theory often equates the woman's look with castration: “If the woman looks,” Stephen Heath explains, “the spectacle provokes, castration is in the air.”⁴ Ironically, then, the scene in which the courtier-poet has finally won his standoffish lady is accompanied by a symbolic emasculation. This intrusion into one of the most private moments of the narrative manages to turn all the courtly posturings and lovesick declarations that preceded it into a bawdy joke.

Although scholars have commented upon the comic bawdiness of this scene and the symbolic castration it enacts, no one has fully considered the role Frances plays. Much admired as a character, Frances has been called “the ideal of womanhood” and “the only realist in the book,”⁵ but she has received no extended treatment. After G. T., the fictional editor of the volume, it is her voice that predominates in shaping the direction of the narrative and in exposing the posturings of both male narrators (F. J. in the poetry and G. T. in prose). By examining her actions using the lens provided by feminist discussions of spectatorship, we come to realize just how crucial to the narrative she is. The appearance of Lady Frances in the doorway further complicates an already complex work, adding yet another perspective to the multitiered narrative. Although I oversimplify, it is enough for now to point out that the story is told twice, once by F. J. through his poems and again in prose by a putative editor, G. T., who claims only to relate what he has been told by F. J. Most basically, Frances's presence adds to the comic distancing created by G. T.'s older, more sophisticated voice. While the text makes much of the clandestine nature of the rendezvous, F. J.'s inability to carry off the liaison in secret clearly shows him to be a somewhat bumbling and naive courtier. But it is not just the privacy of the two lovers that has been disrupted.

What is Gascoigne doing here? Why add yet another perspective to the text, especially since Frances's intrusion works to destroy the illusion that the narrator is only retelling the story he heard from F. J.? Since F. J. is in the throes of passion as Frances peers through the doorway and is asleep when she steals the sword (the text tells us that she is “unperceived by anybody, saving that other gentlewoman which accompanied her” [70]), this is information the narrator cannot possibly be privy to if F. J. is his only source. Is this just a narrative slip on Gascoigne's part? I don't think so. Although the scene seems to defy the logic of the text, I will argue that it actually provides the key to reading Gascoigne's tale.

This episode is significant for two reasons. First, it reproduces the relationship of the reader to the text, and second, it indicates Gascoigne's anxieties about that relationship. Frances's role here is exactly the role Gascoigne has constructed for the reader—that of voyeur. As I will show, Frances's vicarious delight as she watches the two lovers recreates our experience of reading the text.

But second, and perhaps more important, the stealing of the sword articulates the anxieties about gender rife in early modern England. The fear of emasculation is inextricably linked to anxieties about publishing and censorship. The burgeoning of print culture brought with it increasing misgivings about the writer's place within that system. Authors writing at this time were just beginning to evolve an awareness of the potential—and perhaps the threat—offered by the fixity of print. The printing press looms large in their imaginations, emphasizing their vulnerability as writers. “To come to the presse,” Dekker laments in News from Hell, “is more dangerous than to be prest to death, for the payne of the Tortures last but a few minutes, but he that lyes upon the rack in print, hath his flesh torn off by the teeth of Envy, and Calumny.” Moreover, as Mary Ellen Lamb has suggested, writing became an increasingly gendered activity in the period.⁶ This gendering is clear throughout Gascoigne's works, where male sexuality and literary power seem inextricably linked. In one particularly telling instance, Gascoigne takes Philomela (the archetypal female poet who refuses to be silenced) as his persona; in another, he becomes the hermaphrodite Satyra, whose tongue is brutally cut out. And in The Adventures of Master F. J., the pen and the sword, both symbols of phallic power, are conflated. The stealing of the sword metaphorically enacts the writer's greatest fear, the confiscation of his pen. Gascoigne's choice of imagery, then, suggests what happens when literary power is suppressed. Paradoxically, the man who loses generative literary power becomes like a woman.

That Frances serves as a kind of stand-in for the reader becomes clear when we look at the overall structure of the work. The entire narrative insists on casting the reader in the role of voyeur; everything is calculated to give the illusion of an illicit and forbidden text. Instead of a straightforward introduction, the work is framed with a series of letters, “the Printer to the Reader,” “H. W. to the Reader,” and “G. T. to his very friend H. W. concerning this work.”⁷ Although authors often circulated their poems among the gentlemen at court to display their rhetorical prowess, I know of no other text from the period that actually illustrates this process within its pages. Each letter writer seeks to deny guilt for ignoring the author's wishes by making the work public, and each emphasizes the need for discretion on the part of the reader: “I require your secrecy herein,” G. T. insists (51). And H. W. seeks to protect the author at all costs—“I cover all names”—and implores the reader to be discreet. The letters and initials serve to eroticize the reading process, creating what Wendy Wall calls a “voyeuristic text.”⁸ Even the exaggerated reticence of the narrator, who modestly glosses over certain scenes, contributes to this effect. The reader becomes a spectator intruding on the private conversations and moments of the narrative.

Of course, such authorial dodges and disavowals were conventional. Authors typically surrounded their texts with prefatorial disclaimers to avoid the “stigma of print”⁹ and to evade responsibility should their work meet with unsympathetic censors. But Gascoigne's use of these letters far exceeds the convention. By multiplying the authorial disclaimers, Gascoigne calls attention to them, deliberately titillating the reader. As each letter writer stresses the need for secrecy, the act of reading becomes increasingly illicit. Further, if, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have suggested, in the masculine tradition of writing the text is a woman,¹⁰ here the text seems prostituted and hence its value cheapened as it passes from hand to hand until it is finally exposed to the public and sold. The prostituting of the text becomes clear as the language of the marketplace begins to creep into its wording. Although the Printer purports to publish the work for instructive reasons, claiming that the reader can “take example by the unlawful affections of a lover bestowed upon an unconstant dame” (47) and that “the well-minded man may reap some commodity out of the most frivolous works that are written,” he twice uses the word “commodity” to describe the work, hinting that his real interest is in fattening his purse. And H.W. outdoes the Printer in his self-interestedness, using the word “commodity” three times and speaking of “procur[ing] these trifles” for publication. Nonetheless, he minimizes his pimping of the text, dubbing himself “but half a merchant” because he has delivered only copies to the publisher to print and sell. This framing works to eroticize the text, provoking the reader with a kind of verbal striptease, with layers that must be peeled away to get at the real meaning.¹¹

This textual peep show continues throughout the work. Later in the narrative the pages are described as “telltale” and as “blabbing leaves of betraying paper” (54). Even the subterfuge of initials taunts the readers to find true-life connections and adds to the feeling that they are trespassing on private correspondence. As Wendy Wall explains in her discussion of voyeuristic texts, such strategies “both [seduce] the reader and [force] him/her into the position of a voyeur; someone who must read to seek out information that is forbidden or withheld, to find what the text makes clear should not be known. It is a game of power and desire.”¹² Oddly enough, although the construction of voyeurs displaces responsibility for the text onto the reader, it is also a great source of anxiety for the writer because he has ceded control over his text. Just as he cannot control where the voyeur looks, likewise he cannot control the reader's interpretations. Nor can he dictate who reads his work after it is published. Once let loose upon the marketplace, it is subject to the judgment of anyone who can afford to buy it, regardless of learning or taste. This lack of control is, I think, what Frances in part represents.

When we get to the actual story itself, composed of a series of poems and letters chronicling the courtship between F. J. and Elinor, we realize that the narrative is more closely related to the sonnet sequence than to anything else. This genre creates voyeurs of its readers, constructing them as intruders upon an ostensibly private seduction. Read as a sonnet sequence, Gascoigne's narrative offers a clear example of the kind of forbidden text Wall describes.

Yet Gascoigne's version of the sonnet sequence differs markedly from the tradition as derived from Dante's Vita nuova and Petrarch's Canzoniere. Typically, sonnet sequences exist unmediated and, at least in theory, are directed toward a resistant female reader. Here virtually everything in Gascoigne's narrative structure conspires to figure this voyeuristic reader as male. The text comes to us through not one but three male readers and is heavily weighted with the commentary of one of these. The stress placed on G. T.'s point of view serves at once to satirize the courtly posturings of the lovers and to confine the reader to the male vision of events. The letters preceding the narrative and the addition of the fictional editor both work to exclude the female reader who ostensibly is the raison d'être of the poetry. It is not Elinor's reactions to F. J.'s poetry that take precedence here but G. T.'s, and beyond him, H. W.'s and the Publisher's.

Further, as in any sonnet sequence, the poetry works to undercut the power of the female reader by fetishizing and verbally dismembering her in the way it describes her.¹³ This strategy allows F. J. to control his mistress even while feigning subservience to her: “Hir haire of gold, hir front of Ivory, / (A bloody hart within so white a brest) / Hir teeth of Pearle, lippes Rubie, christall eye, / Needes must I honour hir above the rest” (77). She is an eye, a cheek, a lip, anything but a whole woman. This fragmenting of the sonnet lady effectively neutralizes her power over the sonneteer. The sonnet sequence plays out metaphorically the technique used literally in modern pornography, where the female body is displayed, exposed, and, frequently, mutilated.

Although the correspondence is not exact, recent feminist film theory dealing with female spectatorship and the gaze provides a useful framework for discussing the role of the lady in the sonnet sequence. Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane, E. Ann Kaplan, and others have shown that classic Hollywood cinema typically denies female pleasure by privileging the male gaze and constructing desire in ways that objectify and fetishize women.¹⁴ Women are recreated as “spectacles in a theatre of male scopophilic desire.”¹⁵ As Mulvey explains in her now classic essay, “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema,” pleasure is rooted in a patriarchal system in which the “bearer of the look” is male and the “object of the look” is female. This system offers little room for female curiosity and desire. Kaplan writes, “The gaze is not necessarily male (literally), but to own and activate the gaze, given our language and the structure of the unconscious, is to be in the masculine position.”¹⁶ The female gaze is cut off because it is perceived as dangerous. There is a power in looking, a power that affords the man mastery over the woman, who in the Freudian view is always seen as threatening because of her “lack” of a penis. The Petrarchan erotics of the sonnet sequence is also grounded in the male gaze. The lady in the sonnet sequence exists to be looked at and displayed; she is passive, exposed, and silent. F. J.'s first poem to Elinor suggests as much.

Ironically, F. J.'s poetic campaign to win the lady Elinor begins with a reference to a disastrous instance of male looking, one that results in adultery and, ultimately, murder. Here F. J. presents himself as David and Elinor as Bathsheba:

Fayre Bersabe the bright once bathing in a Well,
With deawe bedimmd King Davids eyes that ruled Israell. …
What wonder seemeth then? when starres stand thicke in skies,
If such a blasing starre have power to dim my dazled eyes?

(52)

Any Elizabethan reader would surely know that David loses his son and his kingdom in a series of events set in motion by his spying on the bathing Bathsheba; hence the reference recoils on F. J., foreshadowing his own downfall and forewarning the reader of the dangers of gazing on forbidden sights. Interestingly, the story of David and Bathsheba is often used as a precaution admonishing men to eschew feminine wiles and seductiveness. Although the Bible says nothing of Bathsheba's culpability for David's downfall, many of the commentaries place the blame squarely on her shoulders: “Who led astray David the holy and led wise Solomon astray with sweet charm so that the one turned adulterer and the other committed sacrilege—who but seductive woman?” one medieval churchman queries.¹⁷

Elinor seems exactly the kind of powerful and beautiful woman that the prescriptive literature condemns and that the sonnet sequence seeks to control. She is no ordinary sonnet lady and refuses to be contained within its courtly parameters. Although willing to play the courtly game when it suits her to do so, unlike her Petrarchan counterparts she does not remain silent. She is not the stereotypical virgin, and several times she lures F. J. to her bedroom; we learn early in the narrative that she has no scarcity of ready lovers. Further, she seems a willing participant in F. J.'s seduction game, succumbing to his pitiful entreaties after only five poems. As a woman fully aware of her desires and sexual power, she is, as we might expect, granted dubious moral status. Nonetheless, although she does so willingly, she basically plays the role scripted for her by the courtly discourse of the genre. She is alternately disdainful and kind, haughty and loving. And she seems conscious of herself as a spectacle, relishing her role as a visual object on display for the male viewer. For example, the afternoon after she and F. J. have consummated their love and F. J. has celebrated the occasion with the poem entitled “A Moonshine Banquet,” Elinor appears in the garden with the word “contented” printed on a piece of paper and pasted across her forehead. Here she seems to objectify herself as a text to be read and gazed upon. Although the spectacle contains the power to arouse and stimulate, we soon discover that this power has its consequences. Elinor seems caught in exactly the double bind film theorist Teresa deLauretis describes: she is “doubly bound to that very representation which calls on her directly, engages her desire, elicits her pleasure, frames her identification, and makes her complicit in the production of her womanness.”¹⁸ By playing into the courtly tradition that depends so completely on the worship and display of women, Elinor finds that she is bound by its dictates. If she is only a body to be gaped at and possessed, she has little say in who looks upon her and who judges her.

Even the antitheatricalists' arguments prohibiting women's attendance at the theater have at their roots a recognition of the power of sight. Women at the theater are at once threatened and a threat, spectacle and spectator. Curiously, a correspondence is made between spectacle and whore in many of these tracts; for the woman to be looked at in a public space suggests she can be possessed and owned by men other than her husband. As Stephen Gosson cautions, “Thought is free; you can forbidd no man, that vieweth you, to noute you and that noateth you, to judge you, for entring to places of suspicion.”¹⁹ As Jean Howard explains, “In Gosson's account the female playgoer is symbolically whored by the gaze of many men, each woman a potential Cressida in the camp of the Greeks, vulnerable, alone and open to whatever imputations men might cast upon her. She becomes what we might call the object of promiscuous gazing.”²⁰ Similarly, the sonnet lady is exposed and “whored” by the gaze of her many male readers once the sonnet sequence is circulated for public consumption. This effect of the gaze, combined with the fact that Elinor is a known adulteress, perhaps explains why her subsequent rape is so easily dismissed.²¹ But the woman in the theatrical arena, like Frances in Gascoigne's tale, is intimidating as well because she has the power to return the look. (Women seem damned whether they are merely looked upon or actually do the looking. The author of the Ancrene Riwle [ca. thirteenth century], for example, tells the story of Dina, a woman who dared to leave her house to see “the strange women.” “What happened, do you think as a result of that looking? She lost her maidenhood and became a harlot. Later, as a result of it, the promises of great patriarchs were broken, and a great city burned to the ground, and the king and his son and the men of the city were killed and the women led away; her father and her brothers, noble princes though they were, were outlawed. This is what came of her looking.”²² A hard price to pay for a little curiosity!)

The most extreme evidence of the vulnerability inherent in playing the spectacle occurs toward the end of the tale, when F. J. reacts to Elinor's rejection of him by raping her. The viciousness of this scene brutally uncovers the underlying misogyny of the narrative and of Petrarchan poetics in general. Although Elinor seems unique among sonnet ladies, she is nonetheless assimilated into the patriarchal ethos of the Petrarchan discourse. Although she manipulates the representation to suit her own interests, Elinor plays out the constructions of femininity depicted in the love poetry of the day. Frances, on the other hand, interrogates the Petrarchan stance, poking gentle fun at F. J.'s misguided posturings.

Although Frances might seem at first to provide a positive counterpart to the wanton Elinor, allowing Gascoigne to complete the virgin/whore dichotomy, we soon detect that she, too, is suspect. Despite G. T.'s glowing appraisal of her as “a virgin of rare chastity, singular capacity, notable modesty, and excellent beauty,” her prurient interest in the sexual dealings of F. J. and Elinor suggests a character far more complex. She constantly watches the two at their lovemaking and, at one point, even offers herself as a substitute for Elinor: “Although percase I shal not do it so handsomly as your mistres, … if you vouchsafe it, I can be content to trim up your bed in the best maner that I may, as one who would be glad as she to procure your quiet rest” (100-101). In fact, Frances, not Elinor, poses the real female threat to F. J., controlling and creating a narrative of her own as she allegorizes F. J. as Trust and herself as Hope. The doubleness of her character is implied in Gascoigne's choice of a name for her—the name Frances means “open,” suggesting at once her role as F. J.'s confidante and her sexual receptiveness.²³

And it is Frances who undermines the Petrarchan rhetoric of the sequence and is empowered by the narrative. In the scene with which I began this essay, Frances's gaze represents an inversion; the woman turns the tables on the masculine gaze that is intrinsic to the sonnet sequence. She breaks the code of modesty by not averting her eyes as the prescriptive literature commands her in the name of chastity to do. Constraints on the female spectator are everywhere present in the literature of the day. Conduct book after conduct book warns women of the dangers of sight:

Eyes are the casements of the body, and many times by standing too much open, let in things hurtful to the mind. A wanton eye is the truest evidence of wandering and unsteadfast thoughts; we may see too much, if we be not careful in governing our eyes, and keeping them from going astray, and returning with vain objects to the fancy and imagination. … Therefore, ladies, to prevent the malady, which like a spreading contagion disperses itself into most societies, you must keep your eyes within compass, from wandering as much as possible. … Consult chastity and modesty … give no occasion then, ladies, for any to tax your eyes with anything that is not modest, comely, and allowable.²⁴

The belief holds that sight is particularly dangerous because thoughts that enter through the eyes are especially uncontrollable.

In Gascoigne's narrative not only does the woman look, but she takes an erotic pleasure in her look. The odd thing is that, in a narrative largely about male desire and conquest, female desire is foregrounded—at least in this particular scene. By usurping the male rights to the gaze, Frances transforms F. J., the writer of the sequence, into the spectacle. As the spectacle rather than the spectator, he loses his position of mastery and control; he is emasculated, as Gascoigne suggests by having Frances take his sword. I would argue that Frances's gaze represents Gascoigne's own anxiety about the inability to control his readers after publishing his work. The power no longer resides in the author but in the reader. That this reader is figured as female makes her all the more terrifying. In fact, in a letter complaining about the disastrous reception of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, the volume in which The Adventures of Master F. J. first appeared, he describes his newly edited works as “gelded” and “poemata castrata.”²⁵

What happens, then, when the woman looks? In this case, she begins constructing her own narratives, taking up the pen that she has symbolically appropriated from F. J. when she steals his sword. Visual power brings with it a corresponding verbal or narrative power. Once F. J. realizes that his sword is missing, Frances casts him as a central character in a tale of her own devising. Here she structures her story as a dream vision: “I dreamt this night that I was in a pleasant meadow alone, where I met a tall Gentleman, apparelled in a night gowne of silke all embroadered about with a gard of naked swords” (73).

And later, toward the end of the work, as F. J. and Elinor's relationship begins to turn sour, she concocts a witty little parable to teach F. J. the error of his ways. Interestingly, this tale within the tale provides another example of voyeurism in the text. Here a husband watches through the keyhole as his wife makes love with her suitor. The husband is at least temporarily emasculated by what he sees. For six months he will not—or cannot—sleep with his wife. The only way he has of regaining the control he lost when he peered at his wife through the keyhole is to treat her as a common prostitute. Again, the woman is whored by a look. (Obviously, Frances is not completely subversive. She seems to accept some of the patriarchal configurations of woman as she figures the Elinor character in her story as a whore.) “At last … [when] he fell agayn to company with his wife as other men do … he used this pollicy: everytime that he had knowledge of her, he would leave either in the bed, or in the cushencloth, or by hir looking glasse, or in some place wher she must needes find it, a piece of money” (98). The wife finally asks her husband his meaning and, when told, falls on her knees begging forgiveness. The two, we are led to believe, live happily ever after. Frances's story should reveal to F. J. that his desire to keep Elinor as his mistress is misdirected, but it does not. Although F. J. answers the riddle posed by Frances correctly (“Whose perplexity is greatest, that of the husband discovering his wife through the keyhole, that of the wife receiving the slips of money from her husband, or that of the lover whose mistress abandons him?”), he fails to recognize himself in the tale. Ironically, F. J., who has the least insight into his own situation, is designated the judge of the question, and equally ironically, he answers correctly. Nevertheless, he fails to perceive the similarity between his situation and the one described by Frances. If he did, he would see how misguided his own actions were. As Frances instigates the game, in fact, this seems precisely her goal, a goal very similar to that which G. T. ascribes to literature: “we could … devise some like pastimes to trie if your malladie would be cured with like medicines” (87). Like Rosalind educating Orlando about the verities of real as opposed to literary love, Frances seeks to show F. J. the limitations of his courtly posturing.

But Frances also uses her story to gain the upper hand in her relationship with F. J., hoping that he will see himself in the tale she tells and turn his attentions to her. Of course, one of the central reasons that Frances retains her power throughout the narrative is precisely because F. J. does not desire her. He is not in love with her and never approaches her as lover to lady; therefore, she is not caught up in the scopic economy that defines Elinor. Frances enjoys a freedom and perspective denied to the other characters in the narrative who allow their actions to be completely dictated by the roles they have chosen.

As Frances's verbal power increases, F. J.'s decreases. At this point in The Adventures F. J.'s poems have lost their ability to persuade Elinor. Since the text equates writing with sexual conquest, once Elinor rejects F. J., the poet seems to have lost both his sexual and his literary power. By the end of the narrative, his poetic voice is reduced to mocking the woman as he hurls Elinor's words back at her in anger. Paradoxically, her voice becomes his. His final poetic effort is a poem centered around Elinor's retort when F. J. ironically accuses her of unfaithfulness: “And if I did, what then?” The voice of the narrator also seems cut off. G. T. abruptly ends his story, saying, “I will cease, as one that would rather leave it unperfect than make it to plaine” (105). With these words, Gascoigne refuses to end his tale, moving instead to other poems in the collection.

More than just a foil to the sonnet lady, Frances thus occupies a subversive place in the text. She defines a space for herself, creates fictions, and ultimately wrests language from the dominant male speakers of the narrative. Even more than G. T., Frances exposes the artificiality, silliness, and even danger of taking Petrarchan rhetoric too seriously. Frances embodies recalcitrant “female autonomy” and represents the author's failure to allay his anxieties about reading and writing, anxieties that seem inextricably connected with sexuality and gender. Her power is exactly the kind of mysterious power described by Gilbert and Gubar “of the character who refuses to stay in her textually ordained ‘place’ and thus generates a story that ‘gets away’ from its author.”²⁶

One final note: when Gascoigne revised The Adventures of Master F. J. in 1576 for publication in The Posies, he did complete the tale. F. J. (now called Ferdinando) “tooke his leave, and without pretense of returne departed to his house in Venice: spending there the rest of his dayes in a dissolute kind of life: & abandoning the worthy Lady Fraunc[ischin]a [Frances], who (dayly being gauled with the grief of his great ingratitude) dyd shortlye bring hir selfe into a myserable consumption: wherof (after three yeares languishing) she dyed: Notwithstanding al which occurrence the Lady Elinor lived long in the continuance of hir accustomed change.”²⁷ Our unruly woman is finally punished for her transgression and is killed off.

Notes

1. George Gascoigne, The Adventures of Master F. J. in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. C. T. Prouty (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1942) 69-70. All subsequent quotations from Master F. J. are from this edition and are noted parenthetically within the text.

2. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: Viking, 1973) 47.

3. For an interesting discussion of the repercussions of male voyeurism and Petrarchan poetry as a kind of counterattack to assure the woman's role as spectacle, see Nancy Vickers's discussion of the Actaeon myth in “Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265-79.

4. Stephen Heath, “Difference,” Screen 19.3 (1978): 85.

5. Walter R. Davis, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969) 104.

6. Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990) 27.

7. Modern editors, anxious to relay the story itself and present Master F. J. as a precursor of the modern novel, often excise these letters and begin as Hyder E. Rollins and Herschel Baker do: “F. J. chanced once in the north parts of this realm to fall in company of a very fair gentlewoman, whose name was Mistress Elinor, unto whom, bearing a hot affection, he first adventures to write this letter following” (The Renaissance in England [Boston: D. C. Heath, 1966] 702). Such an introduction moves the story along but does nothing to account for the narrative structuring that makes the work so unique and sophisticated.

8. Wendy Wall, “Disclosures in Print: The ‘Violent Enlargement’ of the Renaissance Voyeuristic Text,” SEL 29 (1989): 35-59. My reading of Gascoigne's narrative has been greatly informed by Wall's essay.

9. See J. W. Saunders, “‘The Stigma of Print’: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry,” EIC1 (1951): 139-64. See also Arthur Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1986) 3-24, and Margaret Ezell, The Patriarch's Wife (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1987) 64-100.

10. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale UP, 1984), 12-13.

11. Wall 52-53.

12. Wall 51.

13. See Vickers, “Diana Described.”

14. See, for example, Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18; Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator,” Screen 23.3-4 (1982): 74-87; E. Ann Kaplan, “Is the Gaze Male?” Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review P, 1983) 309-27; Teresa deLauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984); and Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellincamp, and Linda Williams (Los Angeles: American Film Institute, 1984) 83-99.

15. Sarah Stanbury, “Feminist Film Theory: Seeing Chretien's Enide,” Literature and Psychology 36 (1990): 47.

16. Kaplan 319.

17. Marbod of Rennes, “The Femme Fatale,” from The Book with Ten Chapters (ca. 1123), Woman Defamed and Woman Defended, ed. Alcuin Blamires (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) 101. For further commentaries on Bathsheba, see pp. 8, 15, 32-33, 75, 95-96, 105-6.

18. DeLauretis 15.

19. Quoted in Jean E. Howard, “Scripts and/versus Playhouses: Ideological Production and the Renaissance Public Stage,” The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991) 224.

20. Howard 224.

21. For further discussion of the rape scene, see my “‘A Poet with a Spear’: Writing and Sexual Power in the Elizabethan Period,” Renaissance Papers (1992): 1-15.

22. Quoted in Blamires, [Alcuin, ed. Woman Defamed and Woman Defended. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992,] 95.

23. Staub, [Susan. “‘A Poet with a Spear’: Writing and Sexual Power in the Elizabethan Period.” Renaissance Papers (1992): 1-15,] 9.

24. The Ladies Dictionary (1694) quoted in The Whole Duty of a Woman: Female Writers in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Angeline Goreau (Garden City: Dial, 1985) 57-58.

25. “To the Reverende Divines,” George Gascoigne, The Posies, ed. John W. Cunliffe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1907) 6.

26. Gilbert and Gubar 28.

27. “The Pleasant Fable of Ferdinando Jeron[i]mi and Leonora de Valasco,” in The Posies 453.

A version of this paper was presented at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in October 1992.