Abstract
In 1996, Jennifer Summit’s article ‘The Arte of a Ladies Penne: Elizabeth I and the Poetics of Queenship’ argued for the first time that the relationship between Elizabeth I and her cousin Mary Queen of Scots was played out through the circulation of their texts. Summit constructs an ingenious argument surrounding the writing of Elizabeth I, linking her poetics of queenship with a ‘poetics of covertness’: Elizabeth’s use of the discourse of secrecy to construct public knowledge as private. Elizabeth positions her readers as privileged insiders coveting those secrets, and uses privacy itself to produce the public effects upon which her authority as female sovereign depended. Elizabeth’s complex manipulation of the terms of coterie manuscript poetry is contrasted with a group of Mary Stuart’s texts to demonstrate ‘how both queens adapted poetic topoi to construct a language of female readership’.1 However, in constructing Mary’s poetics, the article briefly discusses one letter and a manuscript poem sent by Mary to Elizabeth in 1568, then focuses its argument for Mary’s textuality not upon her widely circulated body of writing, but upon a collection of her embroideries. Summit reads Mary’s use of Petrarchan figures as conduits of the author’s emotional state, as ‘confessions of her own vulnerability’, and as ‘a means of figuring her own fear and helplessness as effects of desire’.
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Notes
Jennifer Summit, ‘The Arte of a Ladies Penne: Elizabeth I and the Poetics of Queenship’, ELR 26 (1996): 395–413.
Despite the rapid development of scholarship on representations of Elizabeth, by Susan Frye, Carole Levin and Helen Hackett, among others, other discussions of Elizabeth’s self-representations have been surprisingly limited. However, the recent scholarly editions of her writing have generated a set of responses: see Constance Jordan, ‘States of Blindness: Doubt, Justice, and Constancy in Elizabeth I’s “Avec l’aveugler si estrange” ‘; and Leah S. Marcus, ‘Queen Elizabeth I as Public and Private Poet: Notes toward a New Edition’, in Reading Monarch’s Writing: The Poetry of Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, and James VI/I, ed. Peter C. Herman (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 109–153; Janel Mueller, ‘Virtue and Virtuality: Gender in the Self-Representations of Queen Elizabeth I’, Form and Reform, 220–246; Clarke, Politics, 204–208.
In ‘Boredom and Whoredom: Reading Renaissance Women’s Sonnet Sequences’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 10:1 (1997): 165–191, Elizabeth Hanson examines Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and the casket sonnets in order to examine ‘the imperfect alignment of gender ideology and the sources of poetic power’; although it notes ‘rare’ moments of discursive complexity in the casket sonnets attached to key terms of constancy, subjectivity and subjection, the article’s focus on the intersection of Petrarchism and gender produces the familiar narrative of the female sonneteer’s inability to negotiate textual and cultural codes: ‘she effectively deconstructs any position she might occupy’. Lisa Hopkins and Mary E. Burke both offer close readings of the sonnets, with Hopkins discussing the second sonnet only (for reasons of attribution) in terms of its confidence and assumption of authority, whereas Burke analyzes the whole sequence’s negotiation of gender, power and textual agency occasioned by its female sovereign speaker as ‘a mirror of the psyche of a woman battling to reconcile the contrary positions of ruler and woman’. Like Betty Travitsky, neither Hopkins nor Burke discuss the attribution debate fully, but use selective evidence to support their assumptions of authenticity. By contrast, Peter C. Herman’s recent essay ‘ “mes subjectz, mon ame assubjectie”: The Problematic (of) Subjectivity in Mary Stuart’s Sonnets’, in Reading Monarchs Writing, 51–78, is the most detailed discussion of the sonnets to date; although he attributes them to Mary in his analysis, arguing for her complex and often contradictory manipulation of gender politics in the sonnets, he notes their continued significance if forgeries as they ‘testify to the contemporary recognition of a distinctly feminine lyric voice’. Similarly, Sarah Dunnigan’s nuanced and provocative feminist analysis of the sonnets leaves the question of their attribution open. Lisa Hopkins, Writing Renaissance Queens: Texts by and about Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 81–83;
Mary E. Burke, ‘Queen, Lover, Poet: A Question of Balance in the Sonnets of Mary, Queen of Scots’, in Women, Writing and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. Mary E. Burke et al. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 101–118;
Betty Travitsky, The Paradise of Women: Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 187–191;
Sarah M. Dunnigan, Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 15–45.
See Ian McFarlane, Buchanan (London: Duckworth, 1981), 348–350.
Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 36–37.
Cambridge, MS Oo. 7. 47., fols. 46r-49r. Peter Davidson has recently argued that the presence of this manuscript within a collection of other mid-sixteenth-century materials highly incriminating to Mary suggests that they were prepared as part of a dossier of documents ‘intended to be proof that Mary was guilty of murder’. While possible, the argument needs development — it cannot rest on material proximity to other documents alone, and his assumptions about authorial intention are necessarily speculative. The print source might equally have been the copytext for the manuscript, and Davidson does not discuss the possibility that the Scots marginals were not contemporary, but added to explicate and identify a biographical context after the event. Peter Davidson, ‘New Evidence Concerning Mary Queen of Scots’, History Scotland 1 (2001): 28–34.
His article might also be compared to Hans Villius’ argument for the authenticity of the letters, which isolates differences in the portrayal of Darnley and the queen in the casket letters and in other documents produced by the Scottish lords. He argues that the absence of direct reference to murder in the casket letters, in contrast to the more specific references of Lennox’s indictments and the Book of Articles, shows a surprising and anomalous tentativeness of the part of the forgers. Hans Villius, ‘The Casket Letters: A Famous Case Reopened’, The Historical Journal 28 (1985): 517–534.
Jenny Wormald, Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure (London: Collins & Brown, 1991), 177–178.
This theory originated in Robert Gore-Brown, Lord Bothwell (London: Collins, 1937), 99–109.
He was followed by M.P. Willcocks, Mary Queen of Scots (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1939), 301–303;
M.H. Armstrong Davison, The Casket Letters: A Solution to the Mystery of Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Damley (London: Vision Press, 1956), 206–221;
H.F. Diggle, The Casket Letters of Mary Stuart: A Study in Fraud and Forgery (Harrogate: R. Ackrill, 1960), 99–109;
George Donaldson, The First Trial of Mary, Queen of Scots (London: Batsford, 1969), 73.
See Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 107–114; Summit, Lost Property, 163–202; and Clarke, Politics, 203–208.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).
James Emerson Phillips, Images of a Queen: Mary Stuart in Sixteenth-Century Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964).
Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 65–82.
Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose, eds, Elizabeth I: Collected Works (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 133–134.
Kevin Sharpe, ‘The King’s Writ: Royal Authors and Royal Authority in Early Modern England’, in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 119–123.
For accounts of female complaint, see John Kerrigan, Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990);
and Götz Schmitz, The Fall of Women in Early English Narrative Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
John Staines notes a similar ambivalence towards Elizabeth’s political rhetoric in Spenser’s 1596 examination of the sciences of rhetoric and politics in the Faerie Queene. John D. Staines, ‘Elizabeth, Mercilla, and the Rhetoric of Propaganda in Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31:2 (2001): 283–312. His article participates in a critical re-evaluation of representations of Elizabeth to include a persistent strand of cultural negativity;
see Julia M. Walker, ed., Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998).
Isabella] W[hitney], The Copy of a Letter, Lately Written in Meeter, by a Yonge Gentilwoman: To her Unconstant Lover… (London, 1567), and A sweet Nosgay, or Pleasant Posye: Contayning a Hundred and Ten Phylosophicall Flowers (London, 1573).
George Turbervile, The Heroycall Epistles of… Publius Ovidius Naso (London, 1567).
Danielle Clarke, ed., Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer: Renaissance Women Poets (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), xiv, and ‘ “Formd into word by your divided lips”: Women, Rhetoric and the Ovidian Tradition’, ‘This Double Voice’, 78.
Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 63–91.
Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 122–128.
Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Bess Carey’s Petrarch: Newly Discovered Elizabethan Sonnets’, The Review of English Studies 50 (1999): 304–319.
Jamie Reid-Baxter, ‘Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross: 3500 New Lines of Verse’, in Woman and the Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing, ed. Sarah M. Dunnigan, C. Marie Harker and Evelyn S. Newlyn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 195–200.
John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, Piae Afflicti Animi Consolationes (Paris, 1574), 40.
P.J. Holmes, ‘Mary Stuart in England’, in Mary Stewart: Queen in Three Kingdoms, ed. Michael Lynch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 212.
Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 37.
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© 2005 Rosalind Smith
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Smith, R. (2005). Generating Absence: The Sonnets of Mary Stuart. In: Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230513686_3
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