Rachel Speght is more radical in the strategies she employs to make herself a place in an overwhelmingly masculine literary tradition. In what Elaine Beilin describes as the “mythmaking” of the “Dream” narrative prefixed to Speght's Mortalities Memorandum (1621), this middle-class London woman explicitly claims access to what she calls “Eruditions garden.”¹ The main poem of Mortalities Memorandum is a meditation on death comparable to that of Alice Sutcliffe. In the stanzaic form later employed by both Sutcliffe and Elizabeth Middleton (different only in its rhyme scheme, abcbdd), Speght's poem marshals her scriptural and classical reading to expatiate at length on mortality. More explicitly than Sutcliffe's poem, the “Memorandum” is both meditation and sermon at once; nearly half the 126 stanzas are devoted to the motives for and benefits of meditation on death. Like Sutcliffe, Speght opens with a description of death's entry into the world, but where Sutcliffe dwells on the fall (and Eve's part in it), Speght's exposition is sketched in four stanzas that emphasize the joint nature of the transgression: “And Sathan thinking this their good too great, / Suggests the Woman, shee the man, they eate. / Thus eating both, they both did joyntly sinne” (13). Speght continues not with an extensive description of vices tempting humanity, but with an analysis of several kinds of death (death by sin, to sin, in sin) and death's “good effects,” comparing the evils of this world with the joys of heaven. The analysis leads into a description of the divergent responses to death of the godly and the wicked (24-27), and then turns to look at the need for meditation on mortality for the remainder of the poem.

Irreproachable in its subject matter, Mortalities Memorandum is structured around a series of topics amplified by means of scriptural and classical examples, and by logical subdivisions that are often signaled numerically within the text. Organization, Latinate diction, and range of reference all display Speght's education. Yet it is in the prefixed “Dreame” and Speght's prefatory addresses that we find the most striking claims to learning and to the rights of authorship. Both the “Dreame” and the dedication to “her most respected God-Mother Mrs Marie Moundford” refer back to a tract published by Speght in 1617, a defense of women written in response to Joseph Swetnam's popular attack, The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Woman (1615).² Speght's A Mouzell for Melastomus was one of several responses to Swetnam. It is the only text from the controversy literature that is openly acknowledged by its author; others use carnivalesque pseudonyms like Ester Sowernam, which disguise the identity and possibly the sex of the author.³ Speght's initial justification for the publication of her second work, “divulging of that to publique view, which was devoted to private Contemplation” (sig. A2) is the justification of the pious teacher: “I levell at no other marke, nor ayme at other end, but to have all sorts to marke and provide for their latter end” (sig. A2v).

Hard on this statement comes a contradictory purpose. Claiming that the publication of Mouzell was greeted with criticism and the suspicion that it was the work of her father, she springs to assert her “rights” as an author: “having bin toucht with the censures of the other [“criticall Readers”], by occasion of my mouzeling Melastomus, I am now, as by a strong motive induced (for my rights sake) to produce and divulge this of spring of my indevour, to prove them further futurely who have formerly deprived me of my due, imposing my abortive upon the father of me, but not of it” (sig. A2v). She makes nothing of her sex in this assertion, assuming the universal nature of proprietorial rights of authorship. Yet the dedication to her godmother and the “Dreame” that concludes with the announcement of her mother's death, which inspires her to write on mortality, both work to construct a literary genealogy that displaces male precedence. The piqued dismissal of the “fathering” of her earlier text is supported by this new “of spring of my indevour,” an off-spring offered in thanks for godly mothering and represented as a revenge of her mother's death: “But sith that Death this cruell deed hath done, / I'le blaze the nature of this mortall foe, / And shew how it to tyranize begun” (11). The new genealogy that Speght is constructing is made more apparent in the “Dreame” itself. In an allegorical narrative that leads the female dreamer from a state of Ignorance to “Eruditions garden,” with the help of Experience, Industry, and Truth, Speght makes a case for Knowledge as the “mother” of virtue:

True Knowledge is the Window of the soule,
Through which her objects she doth speculate;
It is the mother of faith, hope, and love;
Without it who can vertue estimate?

(8)

This mother Knowledge, moreover, is of more value to “Great Alexander” than the biological father he can displace for Aristotle:

Great Alexander made so great account,
Of Knowledge, that he oftentimes would say,
That he to Aristotle was more bound
For Knowledge, upon which Death could not pray,
Then to his Father Phillip for his life.

(8)

It is as if, in dedication and “Dreame,” a maternal genealogy is being tortuously reclaimed for women even as fatherhood is limited to biological reproduction.

The “Dreame” includes a more explicit argument for women's access to “Eruditions garden” in Truth's assertion of women's intellectual capacities. The obstacles which the character “Disswasion” puts forward include “dulnesse, and my memories defect; / The difficultie of attaining lore, / My time, and sex, with many others more” (4). All obstacles but that of sex are removed by Industry; but sex is recognized as an ideological issue that must be confronted more carefully. It is, significantly, Truth that is brought in to argue “by reason” for women's access to Knowledge. Grounding her position in scriptural texts on the faculties of “mind, will and power” equally bestowed on men and women, and (like Margaret Tyler) on the proper use of talents given by God, Truth goes on to give classical examples of learned women. The kinds of knowledge they exemplify, moreover, are made quite specific; primarily they are women skilled in poetry, rhetoric, and art, and among them is a woman writer. Cornelia is held up not only for her eloquence but also for her writing: “A Roman matron that Cornelia hight, / An eloquent and learned style did write” (5). Truth goes on to represent the search for knowledge as a task requiring constancy, valor, and maturity, castigating in the process the “vulgar talk” that opposes learning as the product of animal baseness and ignorance: “For dung-hill Cocks at precious stones will spurne, / And swine-like natures prize not cristall streames” (6). As Experience had taught earlier, good knowledge “by labour is attain'd” (4), and Truth reinvests the search for knowledge with the pains that guarantee its virtue:

If thou didst know the pleasure of the place,
Where Knowledge growes, and where thou mayst it gaine;
Or rather knew the vertue of the plant,
Thou would'st not grudge at any cost, or paine.

(6)

The poem repeatedly emphasizes the significance of Industry in its rewriting of Eve's ambitious theft from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge: it is the promptings of Truth, not Satan, that inspire desire for knowledge here, a “Desire” that can claim it is “a lawfull avarice, / To covet Knowledge daily more and more” (8). The morally suspect terms of this claim, however, suggest an attempt to revise a fundamentally transgressive desire.

“Eruditions garden” is represented as a place of pleasure, a place to wander “with Desire”:

                                                            Instructions pleasant ayre
Refresht my senses, which were almost dead,
And fragrant flowers of sage and fruitfull plants,
Did send sweete savours up into my head;
And taste of science appetite did move,
To augment Theorie of things above.
There did the harmonie of those sweete birds …
Yeeld such delight as made me to implore,
That I might reape this pleasure more and more.

(7)

The very eroticization of women's speech and writing seems to be appropriated here, relocating the garden of love in a garden of learning. Speght's “Dreame” seems to be working to provide a context sufficiently powerful to allow reinterpretation of the very figurations of women's writing that conventionally function to keep women in their place. Given the fraught nature of that project, it is perhaps not surprising that the “Dreame” has to come to an abrupt end, the dreamer “called away” from the garden and finally awakened by the vision of her mother's death. Fictional dream and autobiography interact to construct a new myth of the Fall, in which it is merely “some occurrence” that denies the dreamer rights to Erudition's garden. Speght's eviction, however, does not prevent her from finding ways to write. Her “Dreame” overtly asserts the capacity and ability of women to challenge men's position as “sole possessioners of knowledge” (Tyler 1578, sig. A4).

Notes

1. Beilin calls the “Dreame” a “countermyth to Eden,” “a new myth of woman's intellectual experience” (1987, 111-12). Rachel Speght (1597-?), the daughter of London minister James Speght, takes the conventions of the medieval dream allegory (well-known from such texts as Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess) and employs them as a frame for gender politics. For discussions of Speght's writing, see especially Beilin (1987, 110-17; 1990, 267-71); and Lewalski (1993, 153-75).

2. Speght's contribution to the querelle des femmes debate is discussed in Woodbridge (1984, 87-92); and in Diane Purkiss, “Material Girls: The Seventeenth-Century Woman Debate” in Women, Texts & Histories 1575-1760, ed. Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss (London: Routledge, 1992), 90-95; hereafter cited in text as Brant 1992. Mary Moundford (or Moundeford) was the wife of physician and author Thomas Moundford.

3. Purkiss argues that such names “do not clearly illustrate female agency; rather, they illustrate the taking-up of the position of a disorderly woman for the purpose of signifying disorder of some kind, domestic or political” (Brant 1992, 85).

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

Speght, Rachel. Mortalities Memorandum with a Dreame Prefixed, imaginarie in manner; reall in matter. 1621.

Tyler, Margaret, trans. The Mirrour of Princely deedes and Knighthood. 1578.

Secondary Sources

Books

Beilin, Elaine. Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Brant, Clare, and Diane Purkiss, eds. Women, Texts & Histories, 1575-1760. London: Routledge, 1992.

Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Writing Women in Jacobean England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Woodbridge, Linda. Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620. Brighton, England: Harvester Press, 1984.

Articles

Beilin, Elaine V. “Writing Public Poetry: Humanism and the Woman Writer.” Modern Language Quarterly 51 (1990): 249-71.