Abstract
Sidney thus restages in the Second Song of Astrophil and Stella Musidorus’s attempt to rape Pamela in her sleep. Here the lover is foiled by his fear of her anger, but chides himself ‘for no more taking’ (28). He again plays tricks on his female subject/object in the Fourth Song, in which the repetition of Stella’s refusal, ‘No, no, no, no, my dear, let be’, is twisted — after the poet’s rebuke for her ‘striv[ing]’ (43) against him — into implying a change of heart:
Soon with my death I will please thee.
‘No, no, no, no, my dear, let be.’
(53–4)
Have I caught my heavenly jewel
Teaching sleep most fair to be?
Now will I teach her that she,
When she wakes, is too too cruel.1
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Notes
Aurora (1604), Sonnet 84, ll. 7–8, in The Poetical Works of Sir William Alexander Earl of Stirling, ed. L.E. Kastner and H.B. Charlton (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons Ltd, 1929), ii.
Sir Robert Ayton, ‘What others doth discourage’, ll. 4, 31–2, in The New Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century Verse, ed. Alastair Fowler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991; rpr. 1992), pp. 77–8.
Barnabe Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe: A Critical Edition, ed. Victor A. Doyno (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), p. 39. Hannah Betts notes that this poem’s ‘sustained hostility toward virginity was in obvious opposition to the dominant ideology of the late Elizabethan court’ and that the blazon here is ‘the focus for the text’s rapacious attitude toward the virgin body’. ‘“The Image of this Queene so quaynt”: The Pornographic Blazon 1588–1603’ in
Julia M. Walker, ed. Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 153–84 (p. 166).
See Clark Hulse, Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 17–20.
Gervase Markham, The Famous Whore, or Noble Curtizan: Conteining the lamentable complaint of Paulina, the famous Roman Curtizan (1609), ed. Frederick Ouvry (London, 1868).
See my discussion of ‘shame’ versus ‘guilt’ cultures, p. 17. Ewan Fernie argues that this dichotomy may now be seen as reflecting a contrast between cultures that operate with external or internal sanctions. Shame in Shakespeare (London and NY: Routledge, 2002), p. 16. For a further account of the dynamics of shame and shaming in relation to the complaint, see Catty, ‘Mirrors of Shame: The Act of Shaming and the Spectacle of Female Sexual Shame’ in Alastair Morgan, ed. Being Human: Reflections on Mental Distress in Society (Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books, 2008), pp. 110–24.
John Kerrigan lists these in his introduction to (ed.) Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’: A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 14–23.
Thomas Howell’s Poems (1567–81), ed. Alexander B. Grosart (Manchester: Occasional Issues of Unique or Very Rare Books, 1879), pp. 224–6.
Ruth Hughey, ed. The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1960), pp. 113–15 (I shall cite by line number).
See Thomas Churchyard, ‘Shores Wife’ in Mirror for Magistrates (1563 edition) in Kerrigan, pp. 111–24; Anthony Chute, Beawtie dishonoured, written under the title of Shores wife (1593); Samuel Daniel, The Complaint of Rosamond, appended to Delia (1592), in Kerrigan, pp. 164–90; Michael Drayton, ‘The Epistle of Rosamond to King Henrie the Second’ and ‘The Epistle of Shores Wife to King Edward the Fourth’ in Englands Heroicall Epistles (1597), reproduced in Kerrigan, pp. 192–205; John Higgins, ‘Elstride’ in The Mirror for Magistrates (1574) in Parts Added to The Mirror for Magistrates by John Higgins and Thomas Blenerhasset, ed. Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946); Thomas Lodge, The Complaint of Elstred, appended to Phillis (1593) in Works, ii. 59–84.
Götz Schmitz lists many of these in The Fall of Women in Early English Narrative Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Thomas Blenerhasset, ‘The Lyfe of Lady Ebbe’ (1578) in Campbell; Drayton, Matilda (1594) in The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961), i; William Barkstead, That which seems best is worst. Juvenals tenth satyre: with Virginias death (1617).
Thomas Middleton, The Ghost of Lucrece, ed. Joseph Quincy Adams (NY and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937).
See Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 143.
Richard Barnfield, The Complaint of Chastitie. Briefely touching the cause of the death of Matilda Fitzwater in Poems, ed. Edward Arber (Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., 1896), pp. 35–7 (36).
Carolyn D. Williams, ‘“Silence, like a Lucrece knife”: Shakespeare and the Meanings of Rape’, Yearbook of English Studies xxiii (1993), 93–110 (96–7).
Sasha Roberts discusses the editorial apparatus and marginalia of editions of the poem to emphasise the ‘disjunction between dominant and dissident readings’ of Lucrece’s innocence. Shasha Roberts, ‘Editing Sexuality, Narrative and Authorship: The Altered Texts of Shakespeare’s Lucrece’ in Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti, eds Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England (Early Modern Literature in History. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 124–52 (129). She also shows how later editions more explicitly define the poem’s central act as a rape.
See Schmitz, p. 63. For a full account of the representation of Helen in literature and conflicting representations of her abduction and complicity, see Laurie Maguire, Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). See also
Maguire, Shakespeare’s Names (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), chapter 3, for an account of allusions to Helen and their impact on the portrayal of other Shakespearean Helens.
In John Marston, Poems, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1979), quoting from Ovid, Ars Amatoria, trans. in
William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Their Contemporaries (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1977), p. 153. For the rise of the ‘no-means-yes’ topos as a result of the translation of the Ars, see Garrett.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (London and NY: Longman, 1979).
Susanne Lindgren Wofford, The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 365–6.
See Montrose (1986); Thomas H. Cain, Praise in The Faerie Queene (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1978).
See Harry Berger, Jr., ‘“Kidnapped Romance”: Discourse in The Faerie Queene’ in G. Logan and G. Teskey, eds Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 208–56 (244). For the attempted rape of Belphoebe and its relationship to blazon, see also Betts, who argues that this scene suggests ‘the problems inherent in a political rhetoric that celebrated a commitment to virgin authority through the metaphor of sexual service’ (p. 162).
Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 30.
Stevie Davies, The Feminine Reclaimed: The Idea of Woman in Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), p. 72.
Sheila T. Cavanagh, Wanton Eyes & Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 7.
For the function of landscape as origin in Spenser, see David Quint, Origin & Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 149–66.
For the connection between vision, voyeurism and desire, see Theresa M. Krier, Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990).
For Busyrane as representing Love or Eros, see James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 472, 480–3.
See, for instance, Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 147; Berger (1971), pp. 111, 116; Krier, p. 191.
Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature (London: The Women’s Press, 1981), p. 144.
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© 2011 Jocelyn Catty
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Catty, J. (2011). ‘The subiect of his tyrannie’: Women and Shame in Elizabethan Poetry. In: Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230309074_4
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