Queer Rhetorics of Women Writers

QUEER RHETORICS OF WOMEN WRITERS:

ARTICULATING IDENTITY IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND

Rachael Green-Howard

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the University of Delaware in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English

Summer 2020

QUEER RHETORICS OF WOMEN WRITERS:

ARTICULATING IDENTITY IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND

Rachael Green-Howard

Approved: ______John Ernest, Ph.D. Chair of the Department of English

Approved: ______John Pelesko, Ph.D. Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences

Approved: ______Douglas J. Doren, Ph.D. Interim Vice Provost for Graduate and Professional Education and Dean of the Graduate College

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it meets the academic and professional standard required by the University as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Signed: ______Melissa Ianetta, Ph.D. Professor in charge of dissertation

Signed: ______Julian Yates, Ph.D. Professor in charge of dissertation

Signed: ______Miranda Wilson, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee

Signed: ______Lori Ostergaard, Ph.D. Member of dissertation committee

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many people I need to recognize who directly contributed to the completion of this work. First, thanks to my committee, for their invaluable feedback and support. Thank you to Dr. Lori Ostergaard, for bringing her expertise and knowledge to my work. Dr. Miranda Wilson was one of my first introductions to seriously studying early modern women’s writing, and her encouragement and conversations over the years has strengthened my passion for the work. Thanks to Dr. Julian Yates for many things, but particularly for his feedback on my writing, which is precise and insightful and overwhelmingly kind and has made my work demonstrably better. Finally, to Dr. Melissa Ianetta, who has defined what a mentor is and can be. Her guidance and unwavering support from day one has shaped my research, writing, and teaching for the better. I am lucky to have had encountered all of these fantastic scholars along my journey. The University of Delaware English department is home to too many good professors to name individually—thank you to those who taught me in classes, who mentored me as a teacher, and who worked with me as I went through the program. I’ve had so many wonderful opportunities because of the program, including fellowships that have supported my research. Thank you to the University of Delaware library system. I’m very grateful for the spousal borrowing privileges at Princeton University and the University of Texas. I also would like to thank Austin Community College, particularly the English department and the dual credit/ early college high school program, for being a wonderful employer.

iv I have met many incredible people while working on this dissertation. Jane Wessel, Petra Clark, and Halina Adams are wonderful mentors and even better friends. Thank you to friends from Princeton, especially the terrible movie crew and the trivia team. To those who knew me before I started this journey—thank you especially to Marina Boushra Freiberg, Anna Huber, Erica Boetefuer, and Adrienne Crivaro Moreno. You are the best friends-turned-family I could ever dream of, and our game nights gave me joy to look forward to as I wrapped up my dissertation in quarantine. To my family, I would not be even close to this milestone if not for you. You have supported me and lifted me up every step of the way. To my Moncher family, thank you for always making me feel loved. Thank you to my in-laws, Sue and Steve Howard and my brother-in-law Matt Howard, for all of your support throughout. To my sister, Erica Green, you are a wonderful person and a fantastic friend. To my parents, thank you for everything. You encouraged me to turn my obsession with reading everything near me into a career, and you’ve helped me get there every step of the way. Thank you to my mom, Nancy Green, for your enthusiasm and your genuine interest in everything I learned, which helped keep me focused and enjoying what I do. To my dad, Brian Green, thank you for helping to keep me grounded and encouraging me to move forward, all while helping me find my way. Thank you, always, to my husband, Mike Howard—you know what you did. To be more specific, that was always keeping my dreams in focus and believing in me, even when I couldn’t believe in myself. Thank you for being here for me on every part of this journey and being the best friend and spouse ever. Also thank you to Pippin for being perfect.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... viii

Chapter

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Histories of Rhetoric and the Ideas They Overlook ...... 3 Building Frameworks: Connecting Feminist Rhetoric and Queer Theory ...... 17 Chapter Outlines ...... 21

2 ELIZABETH I: ANDROGYNY, DESIRE, AND QUEENSHIP ...... 28

Princely Bonds, Power, and Kairos in Poetry Addressed to Women ...... 40 Gender, Flirtation, and Kingship ...... 54 Elizabeth I’s Play with Gender and Chastity ...... 67

3 ELIZABETH CARY: FEMALE BODIES AND FAMILIAL NEGOTIATIONS ...... 69

Cary as Mother and Catholic in Text: The Lady Falkland, Her Life ...... 76 Embodied Rhetoric and Domestic Conversation in The Tragedy of Mariam .. 86

4 MARY WROTH, ROMANCE, AND MAKING THE FEMALE OBJECT A SUBJECT ...... 108

Creating Emotions, Undercutting Virtues ...... 114 Frameworks for Wroth’s Life and Works ...... 122

Biography and Women’s Writing ...... 125 Genre and Male Influence ...... 131

Wroth’s Characters as Negotiators ...... 140

5 VARIED SPEECH, CHANGEABLE BODIES, AND MARGARET CAVENDISH’S QUEER RHETORICAL LEGACIES ...... 151

Blazing Worlds and Female Bonds ...... 158 Varied Bodies, Varied Speech, and Threatened Chastity ...... 178

vi Cavendish’s Legacies of Virtue and Intelligence ...... 190

6 CONCLUSION: NEGOTIATING GENDER, SEX, AND WRITING AS WOMEN ...... 192

REFERENCES ...... 198

vii ABSTRACT

Understanding rhetoric (speech and written texts focused on persuasion) and literature (drama, novels, stories, and poems) as separate fields is a modern division superimposed on the past rather than one made either when Greek and Roman rhetors were creating the terms, or when Renaissance thinkers were using them to define and analyze texts. In working to correct the current gap in scholarship that drives the two apart, this dissertation takes up four women writers’ literary texts from the Renaissance era for their ability to add to the feminist rhetoric canon. Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) and Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) are two women who already exist as figures in the history of women’s rhetoric because of their contributions to speeches, treatises, and philosophies—in other words, texts already read as rhetorical—while Elizabeth Cary (1585-1639) and Mary Wroth (1587-1653) are rarely mentioned, because their texts were primarily literary. In addition to reading select literary works for the rhetorical choices they make and demonstrate, this dissertation analyzes how their rhetorical choices and persuasive abilities were used to represent women’s bodies and desires in print spaces, in ways that today would be deemed queer or outside the heterosexual norm. Finally, these readings are put into context with the ways these women’s lives have been interpreted historically, putting them in the context of how their bodies and texts have been understood. With a connection between words and bodies, the women discussed here redefine desire, gender, legacy, and family in their own words. Through rhetorical analysis, queer theory, and historical context, this dissertation works to add to the feminist rhetoric canon by

viii reinterpreting the ways women use persuasive writing while communicating about bodies and desires in poetry, drama, and fiction.

ix Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Even long after other disciplines had expanded the scholarly gaze beyond lavishing attention on Great White Men, the history of rhetoric was long known as “the most purely male intellectual discipline that has existed in Western culture.”1 Because of the strict definitions of rhetoric used in the field, “the attempt to find foremothers in rhetoric, however, has succeeded exactly to the extent that it has been willing to leave the confines of the history… of rhetoric.”2 Even in feminist rhetoric, the examples of women taken directly from the accepted history of rhetoric are sparse or contested or both, as the debates over Aspasia have proven.3 This exclusion of women is in part because of the ways that Greek and Roman definitions of rhetoric,

1 Robert J. Connors, Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 28.

2 Ibid.

3 Xin Liu Gale, “Historical Studies and Postmodernism: Rereading Aspasia of Miletus,” College English 62, no. 3 (January 2000): 361-386, https://www.jstor.org/stable/378936; Cheryl Glenn, “Truth, Lies, and Method: Revisiting Feminist Historiography,” College English 62, no. 3 (January 2000): 387- 389, http://www.jstor.org/stable/378937; Susan C. Jarratt, “Rhetoric and Feminism: Together Again,” College English 62, no. 3 (January 2000): 390-393, http://www.jstor.org/stable/378938; and Patricia Bizzell, “Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do They Make?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30, no. 4 (Autumn 2000): 5-17, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3886115. These essays form a backbone of the debate, but they are far from the only ones who address the issue.

1 from which later iterations of rhetorical theory trace their origins, were tied to public speaking, to issues of justice and courts, and defined by levels of respect the audience imparts to the speaker.4 Women were not citizens and were expected to stay out of the public eye, kept away from the public arena where they would tarnish their reputations as matronae, or, conversely, make their reputations as rhetors. Even on into the 16th and 17th centuries, when issues of citizenship were less directly tied to issues of rhetoric, women were still expected to stay out of public forums and so have not been represented in rhetorical histories. Of course, this exclusion does not mean that women have no rhetorical history or place in the history of rhetoric. Instead, it is a call to read histories critically—both to understand the reasons women have been deliberately left out of rhetorical spaces, both when they are created and when they are remembered, and to understand the way works that do not seem as though they have a place in rhetorical history work in ways that deserve more consideration. This dissertation is an exploration of the ways that women worked around the limitations put on them and contributed to rhetorical thinking despite the history and definition of rhetoric itself. More than this, it is a call for rhetorical reading on the part of historians and scholars. This dissertation argues for a type of rhetorical reading—argues that reading women’s texts from the past gives us an ability to develop our own rhetorical reading practices where we can recognize

4 Different schools of Classical rhetoric define “rhetoric” differently, but Sophistic rhetoric, Aristotle’s school and Roman ideals from Cicero and Quintilian involve public declarations and convincing an audience of the validity of an argument through means including reputation, in situations that include debates about justice. For more on this, see George A. Kennedy’s Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).

2 differences between the past and the ways in which we read now and understand, despite this, how the past can still benefit the ways we write, read, and live today. I advocate for a rhetorical reading strategy that engages with embodied rhetoric (the way bodies can speak and demonstrate arguments through action, clothing, performance, and gender), with eloquence (the ability to communicate deliberately and reach an audience; to have an argument expressed well), and with argument (to communicate a point deliberately and to reach an audience). I argue we need to read that which is not currently earmarked as rhetorical, in forms that we may not recognize as rhetorical intrinsically, in order to find rhetoric. Rhetorical arguments, ideas, and theories are everywhere, and as such we should read for them, rather than looking for forms or genres that are more familiar. More specifically, the characters in the written works I study (and the personas created to speak for women’s personal lives) use rhetoric, communicate through rhetoric, and develop theories of rhetoric that we need to read rhetorically in order to understand.

Histories of Rhetoric and the Ideas They Overlook As both a cause and a symptom of issues of exclusion, women’s contributions to rhetoric are sectioned away from the canonical timeline of rhetorical theory in many traditional histories. George A. Kennedy’s history and classroom staple Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, for example, devotes one page on “Women in the Humanist Movement” in a 32-page chapter about “Classical Rhetoric in the Renaissance.”5 Kennedy is a pedagogical

5 George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 230-231.

3 touchstone in the history of rhetoric, and so his organizational structure still holds sway over a large portion of rhetoric education and scholarship. And Kennedy is far from the only one who, in considering rhetorical histories, pushes women to the side. Thomas M. Conley’s Rhetoric in the European Tradition presents itself as an alternative option to Kennedy.6 Despite its claim to a comprehensive nature, not a single section (often broken down by influential authors) is named after a woman rhetor. This exclusion is particularly noticeable towards the end of the book, when the section on “political and social transformations” of the 19th century claims the years post-Civil War in America were a “commercial and industrial golden age,” and does not include any mention of the women’s suffrage movement, or indeed the end of slavery in America—making it clear here more than anywhere else that the focus of this book is on middle- to upper-class white men at the deliberate exclusion of any and all other populations.7 Instead of being separated out of the main narrative, women are barely a part of this history at all and certainly not a big enough part to merit any kind of sustained discussion. In a book meant to educate students about the history of rhetoric in the West, what readers take away is that women are not a part of this history and that the social changes that affected many non-male and/ or non-white populations during this period did not have any sort of lasting effect on rhetoric.

Localizing further, James J. Murphy’s collection Renaissance Eloquence focuses on one time period, and thus the essays are divided by theme rather than era. While the essays in this text confront some of the major problems seen in the other texts—most

6 Thomas M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (New York: Longman, 1990).

7 Ibid., 236 and 248.

4 specifically, showing the link between rhetoric and literature that was apparent in both the literature produced and the treatises on rhetoric written at the time—it still does not challenge the lack of women in the rhetorical trajectory (Looking at the index, Elizabeth I is well represented, but no other woman is. “Lady Rhetoric as whore,” on the other hand, also gets an entry).8 These texts are a small representative of a larger issue in the field of the history of rhetoric: a decades-long reluctance to open the definition of rhetoric enough to include women rhetors. The definitions of rhetoric created in Greek and Roman eras that excluded women are still being used as standards to keep women out of our histories of rhetoric, and only feminist correctives have begun to readjust this limited lens. Though early modern women are now a part of rhetorical history because of the work done by feminist rhetoricians, their inclusion is still mostly defined by narrow, often patriarchal standards. Indeed, while texts about the history of rhetoric purport to give an overview and outlook to the whole history of rhetoric, their focus maintains a rigid definition of rhetoric that focuses on major men who influence the field and classical concepts of who can speak and why. Even when attempting to make these concepts more flexible, the influence of years of exclusionary politics still does not allow women into the conversation. In order to counterbalance this strict, exclusionary definition, this dissertation engages exclusively with women writers, and posits a definition of rhetoric that does not, by default, maintain a male-only canon. My own forays into defining rhetoric in ways that restructure the field so women’s contributions are considered are informed through feminist rhetoric, a

8 James J. Murphy, editor. Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric (University of California Press, 1983), v-viii.

5 collective project working to assure that women’s writing is not forgotten in the long- regarded as all-male history of rhetoric, often by rethinking what rhetoric means. As a way to advance this project, several anthologies devoted solely to women’s rhetorical traditions (creating timelines of women’s history to supplement canonical timelines that attribute rhetorical work solely or mostly to men) have functioned to both introduce women’s writing to the canon and to reassess what it means to consider something as advancing rhetorical theory. Like these texts, this work disrupts the linear history of rhetoric, transforming understanding by complicating what rhetoric means by using both historical definitions more apt for the Renaissance and applying modern lenses that help us to rethink history with an eye to what was left behind. However, the treatment of women’s rhetoric in the Renaissance remains limited by the span of years that anthologies must cover.9 Because of this lack of space, and because women were so systemically kept out of the rhetorical field, the women’s texts that are included are ones that most clearly mirror the male rhetorical tradition.10 When considering the anthologies and scholarship that focus on women’s writing, the field of authors in early modern England is far from crowded; only a few authors are consistently included in the anthologies and collections devoted to a woman’s tradition. In Cheryl Glenn’s groundbreaking Rhetoric Retold: Regendering

9 See Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s), ed. Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001); and Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies, ed. Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen J. Ryan (West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2010).

10 Carol Mattingly, among others, mentions this fear in “Telling Evidence: Rethinking What Counts in Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 32, no. 1 (2002): 100, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3886308.

6 the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, a chapter on the Renaissance, she includes Elizabeth I (an example of a woman changing a male tradition), Margaret More Roper (a female translator) and Anne Askew (a public speaker and martyr).11 Anthologies such as Available Means, edited by Joy S. Ritchie and Kate Ronald, as well as works about the texts written by women, such as Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics edited by Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen J. Ryan and Listening to their Voices edited by Mary Meijer Wertheimer, work to introduce a few more early modern women into the rhetorical canon.12 They demonstrate the broad range of women’s texts that can contribute to a rhetorical tradition and broadcast these texts by collecting scholarship about them. While these anthologies do much to bring work by women to a broader scholarly audience, they tend to focus on the same group of women: in the early modern period, this most frequently includes Margaret Fell, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, and Madeleine de Scudéry, with occasional references to figures such as Margaret Cavendish, Elizabeth I, and Bathsua Makin. While highlighting these writers is important to demonstrate the women who had an effect on the rhetorical landscape of the 16th and 17th century, focusing mostly on the same group (with a few additions or changes depending on the text) restricts the definition of rhetors. Moreover, a restricted idea of who fits as a rhetor keeps out women who

11 Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 146-170.

12 Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s), ed. Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001); Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies, ed. Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen J. Ryan (West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2010); Listening to their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women, ed. Molly Meijer Wertheimer (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997).

7 were writing, but not in ways that can be recognized under a definition of rhetorical writing through a patriarchal understanding of rhetoric. Of course, issues with adding to and expanding the canon are not local to rhetorical history and questions about who belongs and why have also been asked in English literature, where the work of adding authors has been reshaping the field and the criticism produced within it. Gerald Graff tackles the issues of adding to the canon in his Professing Literature, where he defines the way professionalization has changed the ways the field of literature and English have shifted.13 Graff’s text, with a specific eye to pedagogy, examines canon formation and serves as a model for the ways that the history of rhetoric, a similar and related field, can also be examined. While Graff contends that “literary studies have arbitrarily narrowed the concept of ‘literature,’” he also seems wary of “the feminist controversy” as a way of correcting this limitation.14 Graff claims that anthologies are predominantly furthering an agenda rather than presenting literary texts for their own merit, and he argues against teaching directly from feminist anthologies.15 Graff’s commentary is limited by the fact that it was published in the late 80s, but his wariness of feminist anthologies does speak to a larger idea—that the texts included in anthologies are often chosen for how well they fit in the ideology of the person assembling them, rather than speaking to some larger truth about the field. While Graff’s preface to the 20th anniversary publication of

13 Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History, 20th Anniversary Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

14 Ibid., 11, 260.

15 Ibid., 260.

8 Professing Literature does not update his understanding of feminism’s place in the field, choosing instead to focus on the growing value of composition to English studies and, oddly, to challenge the progressiveness of the academy, his unrelenting view of the deliberate nature of building a canon demonstrates the ways the history of rhetoric was build and can be rebuilt.16 Graff helps to challenge the simplicity of timelines that mention the “greatest hits” of women’s writing from the ancient Greeks to today. As Graff gives a potential outline to think about canon formation and the simplified timelines that arise when canons are countered through a few similar anthologies, another line of feminist inquiry breaks down canonization through in- depth discussions of individual (or in some cases, groups of individuals) women’s contributions. These deep dives engage more fully with the works of women, giving power to women’s writing in ways that were only given to men before. Works such as Krista Ratcliffe’s Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Tradition give space to women’s speaking and writing that has gone undefined and unexamined in the typical rhetorical canon.17 This category of texts is limited in that most of the work done within it focuses on writing and oratory composed in the 19th century and after, thus creating the notion that women’s rhetoric becomes complex, diverse, and worthy of study only in this century and not before it. While this boundary may be in

16 Ibid., xvii-xx.

17 Krista Ratcliffe, Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996).

9 part because of the increase of women included in the public sphere in the 19th century with such events as the suffragette movement making women’s concerns more apparent, even a glance at the timelines mentioned previously shows a limit to the 19th century to be lacking, as women have been composing diverse works worthy of study as long as men have, even if not as prolifically. There are scholars, such as Jane Donawerth and Patricia Pender, who focus their works, in part or in their entirety, on early modern women. Jane Donawerth’s Conversational Rhetoric posits a tradition of rhetoric based in women’s conversations rather than moments of oratory, and starts her timeline in the early modern period.18 Despite the nuances in Donawerth’s arguments, however, and the more specific focus of her work, the text is organized around the concepts that women’s writing has in common, instead of engaging with women writers individually. Patricia Pender’s Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty upends the ideas that women’s declarations of modesty are a downplay on women’s skills in general and therefore an antifeminist move, which was the typical interpretation. Instead, she claims that women’s modesty operates within a larger tradition used by men and women alike, and is therefore a tactic women use to get their work taken seriously.19 While this work engages with the acts of writing from individual women, it is still only one text that can only give space to a few women.

There is vast, untapped potential for early modern women’s rhetoric to expand the ways we think about histories of rhetoric and our conceptions of rhetorical theory

18 Jane Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women's Tradition, 1600-1900 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012).

19 Patricia Pender, Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

10 today. This dissertation functions as a corrective to this impulse to delve deeply in women’s rhetoric only in the last three centuries. With a focused examination of women’s rhetoric in the 16th and 17th centuries, I demonstrate that women’s rhetoric before the 19th century is just as complex, messy, organic, and influential for this current historical moment as the works that came after. In order to examine women’s contributions to the history of rhetoric, I further the conversation about women’s rhetorical history that has grown in feminist rhetoric by revising traditional notions of gender and evidence, and thus opening the gates of the canon to non-traditional types of writing and speech that before have been excluded. To that end, I focus on women writers of the 16th and 17th centuries: Queen Elizabeth I, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Wroth, and Margaret Cavendish. These four women used the strategies of writing, speech, and rhetoric they had to create explicit discussions of gender, sex, sexuality, and womanhood in early modern documents and publications. In some ways, my exploration of early modern women fits the work previously done in feminist rhetoric, as it engages with women who fit the current narrative of who looks and acts like a rhetor. Elizabeth I and Margaret Cavendish both are found in anthologies of women’s rhetoric—Elizabeth for her speeches that define female authority, Cavendish for her World’s Olio, a text that discusses women’s writing and eloquence. The genre of the olio and particularly the speech lend themselves well to discussions of rhetoric, and fit neatly into the history of rhetoric. In addition, the ways that the women position their womanhood and use of rhetorical persuasion is explicit because it has to be, as both women need to address their female bodies and privileged lives in order to make a compelling argument in their works. Moreover, Elizabeth and

11 Cavendish have the kinds of lives that lend themselves to being adjacent to the rhetorical canon—in that they fit the models that men’s writing and education make. Elizabeth, as queen of England, had to work within a masculine framework of kingship in order to be taken seriously as an unmarried ruler. She was given a full humanist education as befit her rank, but one that focused on breadth rather than on making her a ruler because she was disinherited in her childhood. Elizabeth, despite a childhood and young adulthood troubled by issues of being too close to the crown while power struggles were happening, was wealthy, well connected, noble, and educated.20 Cavendish’s life was a little different—while not complicated by proximity to the throne in quite the same way, Cavendish started out life as well- connected and became much more so (and educated as well) when she married William Cavendish, who was close to the throne and supported her love of education. Cavendish’s nobility and the support of her husband who encouraged her writing and publishing directly gave her the ability to publish, the same kind of access that Elizabeth had because of the crown.21 Though Elizabeth Cary and Mary Wroth are not mentioned in feminist rhetorics because of their genre choices (they wrote drama, romances, and poetry instead of speeches and treatises on eloquence), they have similar backgrounds to Elizabeth I and Cavendish: often wealthy, always noble white women who had access to education and some kind of social isolation from the

20 Carole Levin, The Reign of Elizabeth I (New York: Palgrave, 2003); and Elizabeth I and Her Age, ed. Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009).

21 Kate Lilley, introduction to Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), ix-xxxii.

12 backlash that could come from choosing to publish. In these ways, the women in this dissertation connect to the history of rhetoric in ways that are easy to map in spaces of feminist rhetoric: they are women who were able to publish under their own names with little repercussion. However, only a few of the works by Elizabeth and Cavendish, and none of the works by Cary and Wroth, are taken up in our histories of women’s writing because of genre rather than because of a lack of contribution to the field. This work seeks to correct the omission. In order to combat the difficulty of analyzing the writing of early modern women, I deploy a feminist rhetorical framework that focuses on women who were not always clearly in the vein of the masculinist history of rhetoric by looking at works they created that are not traditionally considered strictly rhetorical. Following Krista Ratcliffe’s strategy of “extrapolating,” which she defines as the act of “rereading non- rhetoric texts (such as essays, etiquette manuals, cookbooks, fiction, diaries) as theories of rhetoric,” I argue that, regardless of genre and often because of it, the texts the produced by the four writers of this project offer primers that enable us to decode how they responded to and theorized the rhetorical exigencies of their respective times and places.22 In particular, I extrapolate from works of fiction and literature, which were read and interpreted rhetorically in the Renaissance but are not for reasons of genre separation now.23 As Ratcliffe elaborates, “theories of rhetoric may be

22 Krista Ratcliffe, “Bathsheba’s Dilemma: Defining, Discovering, and Defending Anglo-American Rhetoric(s),” in Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies, ed. Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen J. Ryan (West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2010), 82.

23 Works such as George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589) and Thomas Wilson’s The Art of Rhetoric (1560), both texts that define rhetoric for the early modern era, bear this out through their reading of poetry through a rhetorical lens.

13 extrapolated from women’s and/or feminists’ critiques of language as well as from the textual strategies of such critiques.”24 I use extrapolation to show the rhetorical moves inherent in the non-rhetorical texts these writers produced. These women inhabited a world of the written word where modern demarcations between genres may have been developing, but were not as set as we perceive and read them today. In order to make sense of the works they choose to write, we need to examine them both as works of art and as negotiations to allow them to participate in a strictly masculine arena of writing and publishing. In choosing to “extrapolate,” then, I seek to connect the fields of literary and rhetorical feminism under the shared goals of recovering women’s work and providing new ways to analyze this work for its own merits. The aim, in part, is to expand our sense of the archive of texts that we may readily read as rhetorically significant contributions. As Ratcliffe claims:

Given that few rhetoric texts by women have been, or are likely to be, recovered and given that much of the modern and contemporary research and personal musings about women and language has occurred outside the field of rhetoric and composition, extrapolation may prove a rich interdisciplinary resource for rhetoric and composition scholars who are interested in constructing women’s and feminist theories of rhetoric.25 This project takes this insight as its foundation and proposes to conceive feminist recovery and research much more broadly across the artificial boundaries between

24 Krista Ratcliffe, “Bathsheba’s Dilemma: Defining, Discovering, and Defending Anglo-American Rhetoric(s),” in Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies, ed. Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen J. Ryan (West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2010), 82.

25 Ibid., 82-83.

14 literature and rhetoric. My dissertation primarily considers works that are now sorted into the categories of literature (poetry, long prose works, short stories, drama) in order to create a new canon of women's writing—one that considers literature as viable vehicles for rhetorical thought. I extrapolate from all forms of writing, public and private, that these women produced and disseminated in order to show how the women negotiated their bodies and identities as women who write.26 These works together invoke the women's identities and form a body of work that demonstrates how women created their ethos and constructed their bodies in their texts. When engaging with the history of rhetoric, I define my use of rhetoric in three ways: it concentrates on public eloquence, it moves the audience through a display of morality, and it engages with women who enact rhetorical theory. I work with four women, despite their generic differences, because of the similarities in their positions in life and their choices. All four had some access to education by virtue of their position as noble women, but more than this, all chose to have their works published or entered into the public conversation. With this in mind, I examine each woman in this study not only for her position as a women writer and rhetor in the Renaissance, but also for the ways she defies current conceptions of the history of rhetoric. In place of an unimpeded linear timeline that leads to a better understanding of argumentation, feminism, and queerness, history instead is full of women like these, who adapted tools or created their own tactics to be understood and accepted as writers, as shapers of language and identity, and as people with complex interior lives that can and desire

26 For example, denying femininity and disavowing female solidarity are both ways in which women can negotiate their bodies and identities, as we clearly interpret these women as female writers now.

15 to share those with others. This introduction shows the spaces where these women’s tactics in their writing create new spaces for understanding both rhetoric and history. I turn to the women of the 16th and 17th centuries not because, for example, we can definitively prove the writer herself was a feminist, or was queer, or helped to advance some future political agenda, but whether, in reading her work, we can recover her writing and her choices in a feminist or queer way. In other words, how can we use and understand a past female writer in the context of feminism and queer theory? To better contextualize women writers and women’s writing in feminist rhetoric and queer theory today, I consult Michel de Certeau, who examines the difference between “subjects” and “others” (those who have the power to create culture and those without power, who are limited to consumption), and, in doing so, shows how those others who are marginalized can still create using “tactics,” a method that calls for creation in whatever spaces are available to those who are denied power.27 Through the lens of tactics, I reframe the literary works and published writing of four Renaissance women writers to show how they were able to morph the way they were confined in their lives—told that women should not be educated, or, if they are educated, should not publish their work, or if they do publish, should not publish work on anything related to sex, desire, or the body—and work against the moral confines of society while still participating within them. Carol Mattingly uses a similar method when she argues for including non-traditional analysis when discussing women’s rhetoric. She examines women’s clothing along with their words when speaking in public in the 19th century, as this was discussed as much if not more

27 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xix.

16 in conversations about the speeches than the actual words and arguments presented.28 Acting on the example Mattingly gives, I engage with the context around women’s writing and speech that informs the situations of writing that women lived and worked within. To enhance this corrective, which adds women to the history of rhetoric by applying pressure to the constraints that are typically placed on such a history, I examine four women whose literary, personal, and public writing create a history of women’s rhetoric in the 16th and 17th centuries. Studying their tactics helps to understand how we ourselves can work around and reframe the heteronormative, patriarchal norms that still exist in modern society, and to redefine the ways we can benefit from the projects of four women who had their own struggles, definitions, and relationships that worked within and against systems of oppression and hierarchies of privilege in the Renaissance that confined and helped them as they wrote. Through this dissertation, I open up ways that our modern understanding of rhetoric and gender benefits from recontextualizing women writers through queer and feminist lenses, instead of trying to make women writers fit a “one size fits all” feminist historical trajectory that is inevitably patriarchal.

Building Frameworks: Connecting Feminist Rhetoric and Queer Theory In this section, I define concepts key to my project: the Sophists’ epideictic rhetoric, kairos, and invented ethos. Susan Jarratt’s interpretation of the Sophists demonstrates that their position as outsiders in Athenian culture creates a similarity

28 Carol Mattingly, “Telling Evidence: Rethinking What Counts in Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 32, no. 1 (2002): 105-106, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3886308.

17 between their lack of citizenship and the positions of women (including, of course, women in the Renaissance), who were also kept out of discourse conversations.29 Picking up her argument, I use concepts originally made popular in Sophistic rhetoric, which allow me to position the works I study in a modern framework of rhetorical classification and understanding.30 Using Jarratt’s work creates a framework through which we can view the moves the women used as part of a larger rhetorical tradition, even if we can only see this lineage after the fact. Sophistic and neo-Sophistic rhetoric allows me to extrapolate the rhetorical moves Renaissance women needed to make to position themselves as writers, and to justify their writing and create their identities through it. Working from this understanding of feminism in Sophistic interpretations, I use epideictic rhetoric as a rhetoric predominantly concerned with morality, and because of this preoccupation it can be used by women to prove their own moral qualifications instead of moving into more masculine spaces of legislation or governance.31 In order to create epideictic rhetorical moves, the concept of kairos

29 Susan C. Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 63-79.

30 Despite being aware of the Sophists in the Renaissance, their concepts were not widely used by contemporary rhetoricians. Indeed, the concept of the “Sophist” was often used in the period the way Plato positions them in Socratic dialogues: as the foil to a more rational style of argumentation and thought, and as speakers who were willing to make “the lesser seem greater” for monetary compensation.

31 George A. Kennedy defines epideictic rhetoric as “praise or blame of what was honorable or dishonorable,” and connects the form of rhetoric to the Sophists and their concern with “paradoxes and controversial moral views.” He traces Sophistic ideas of epideictic rhetoric through early Christian thinkers as well, giving Renaissance writers a multi-faceted trajectory for the term. From George A. Kennedy’s Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 7, 30, 60.

18 grounds rhetorical practices in event-specific language, allowing rhetorical strategies to be flexible and adapt to the situation at hand.32 Finally, invented ethos positions the speaker not as who they are, but how they argue in the moment, which allows women to place less stress on their female-gendered bodies and more on their ideas.33 I use these terms in conversation to demonstrate that women's writing in the Renaissance could use several types of rhetorical moves to locate their authority in their words and actions, and therefore direct attention away from the fact that their bodies on their own are not allowed to hold such authority. I continue Jarratt’s line of thinking to open up these concepts outside of understanding them historically; instead, we can also see how they apply to issues of speakers and writers who may not have had access to the specific language of the Sophists but still created such techniques to allow themselves into a larger conversation. The complex ways in which women’s identities are written and interpreted opens up our understanding of the canon, and in doing so, it opens up the way we think about women’s place in society and ways of presenting themselves as a whole. To rethink our assumptions, we must also rethink the way women’s bodies and desires occupy space in their writing and in the public mind. Queer theory and gender studies, through complex and shifting concepts of gender and sexuality and a rejection of particularly contemporary heteronormative assumptions about bodies and sex, creates

32 Susan C. Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 11.

33 Nedra Reynolds’ discussion of “Ethos from the Margins” is particularly relevant in defining invented and situated ethos. Nedra Reynolds, “Ethos as Location: New Sites for Understanding Discursive Authority,” Rhetoric Review 11, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 330, http://www.jstor.org/stable/465805.

19 an explicit vocabulary (or rejection of vocabulary) to analyze the ways women describe their bodies in print as they negotiate their written identities as rhetors and also as women. 34 Theories of queerness examine the link between sexuality, gender, and normalcy that keep women out of public discourse, and engaging with such theories allows me to examine the ways normative structures can be challenged when writers reach outside typical gender roles. Specifically, queer theory helps to examine how Renaissance women position and perform their female bodies as authors, picking up the idea of femininity when it opens doors and denying it when it closes them out of conversations. In particular, Valerie Traub’s work on women, gender, and lesbianism in the Renaissance identifies five tropes that categorize female same-sex desires: pleasure, generation, chastity, tribadism, and friendship.35 Traub’s terms locate moments of female desire and sexuality in women’s writing through the language that the women themselves would best know, which creates a link between the queer theory of today and the categorization of womanhood and female connection that early modern women had access to. I contrast the general idea that the aristocratic women of the Renaissance were expected to be chaste, obedient, and married to the fact that these women wrote desire

34 The debates about applying the term “queer” or other modern markers of sexual identity to historical figures who lived before we developed a vocabulary for queerness also clearly demonstrate that it would be inaccurate to sort people into categories that did not exist for them during their lifetimes. See Kim M. Phillips, and Barry Reay, Sex Before Sexuality: A Premodern History (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011); and Sex Before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England, ed. James M. Bromley and Will Stockton (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

35 Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 15.

20 and sexuality into their works. All four wrote characters and narrators who inhabit spaces of non-normativity—women who negotiate for themselves, who love other women, who enact their own desires. Theories of gender and sexuality allow me to examine the rhetorical position of female bodies with an eye to how they defy Renaissance norms and explore boundaries through their words and rhetorical experimentation.

Chapter Outlines To examine the intersections between rhetoric, sexuality, gender, and identity in early modern England, I explore the writing and the lives of four women in whose careers collectively span from the 1530s to the 1670s: Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603), Elizabeth Cary (1585-1639), Mary Wroth (1587-1653), and Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673). By contextualizing women’s historical performances and writing for their choice of rhetorical practices, I demonstrate how their acts of public writing enact a rhetorical theory of women’s speech that demonstrates morality even when discussing sexuality openly, despite the fact that women who were as visible and powerful as these should have been banned from such practices. All four used rhetorical tactics as defined by de Certeau that validate their ability to speak and write publicly, despite the conflation between public speaking and immorality that could trap them in a life of silence. With each chapter, one per author, I put in conversation the texts these women wrote—fictional texts where their characters have to grapple with issues of rhetoric and rhetorical theory—with the educational and rhetorical contexts in which they lived and the modern frameworks that help to recontexualize their work for modern readers. Each woman represents a new way of examining rhetorical history through feminist rhetorics. Closely examining women’s writing can

21 challenges assumptions made about the history of women and queer people from the assumption of linear progress. To these ends, I reexamine the rhetorical performances of four women writers of the 16th and 17th centuries, and I include each woman in this study not only for her position as a women writer and rhetor in the Renaissance, but also for the ways she defies our current conceptions of the history of rhetoric. Rather than a single timeline that leads to a better understanding of argumentation, feminism, and queerness the closer we get to the modern era, history instead is full of women like these, who adapted tools or created their own tactics to be understood and accepted as writers, as shapers of language and identity, and as people with complex interior lives that can and desire to share those with others. This introduction shows the spaces where these women’s tactics in their writing create new spaces for understanding both rhetoric and history. Chapter Two, "Elizabeth I: Androgyny, Desire, and Queenship," examines the ways in which Elizabeth Tudor’s complicated gender identity as both woman and prince was built through her history of writing and speaking publically. Taking up the mantle of king with a female body, Elizabeth was known before and during her reign for her childhood penchant for education, for her poetry, her open letters and manuscripts that circulated in the court, and the pageantry that surrounded her public speeches both to Parliament and to the public at large.36 Elizabeth's enduring life outside of her time period is constructed through the ways she negotiated being female

36 Carole Levin, The Reign of Elizabeth I (New York: Palgrave, 2003); and Elizabeth I and Her Age, ed. Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009).

22 and king so well, how she embodies a rhetoric of the state that balances her identities as both. This chapter takes up the ways in which Elizabeth deliberately created spoken and written identity that positions her as both powerful and female. I read Elizabeth’s poetry for its rhetorical choices, noting the ways that her poetry as well as her speeches and letters use kairos to highlight her power even as her gender is acknowledged or used in stereotypical ways. Elizabeth’s poems show a constant awareness of public scrutiny that often centers around or focuses completely on her female body and how it intersects with her ability to rule her country. To answer this scrutiny, Elizabeth puts out constant performance of her body as both female and male, taking up the trappings of femininity or masculinity when they benefit her and switching when helpful. Her queer discussions of her own gender show that writing allows Elizabeth a way to explore her body as a private and public entity through public performance, and demonstrates the fragile boundaries that gender has for an early modern woman and statesman. Chapter Three, "Elizabeth Cary: Female Bodies and Familial Negotiations," identifies and explores the intersections that stem from a woman who embodies both a private female citizen negotiating for her family and published author of fiction. Cary’s life and writings create an embodied rhetoric of religion through her negotiation as mother and her Biblically inspired play The Tragedy of Mariam. Cary was best known in her time for being a Catholic convert, which drove a divide between her and her husband and created a power struggle for their right to parent and educate their children, and Cary took action to have access to her children and convert

23 them.37 I put her play and the biography of her written by her daughters in conversation with each other so that Cary's female characters and own gendered and converted body can be read side by side. Though her Mariam and Herod are not analogues of Cary and her husband, they do show the ways in which women can negotiate their lives through both writing and religion, as do Cary's children, who document a woman trying to live her own life in the face of separation from the male members of her family. The Tragedy of Mariam uses fictional women to showcase the many ways in which women are limited in their lives and interactions with men, but also how they can navigate their lives within these limitations. This chapter explores how Cary's public identity as Catholic and mother conflict with her identity as writer and separated woman, and demonstrate how Cary used her writing to explore the complexities of women's experiences. Cary’s life shows how writing, both fictional and private and driven by circumstance, creates a negotiation for how a life should be represented and how women are allowed to discuss themselves and be discussed sympathetically in print. Chapter Four, "Mary Wroth, Romance, and Making the Female Object a Subject," explores the fraught relationship between Mary Wroth’s fictional writing and her private life to show how Wroth positions herself as a writer who can explore women’s emotions and experiences. Wroth challenges rhetorical conceptions of desire, using female protagonists to explore love, lust, and loss in ways that allow women to be the champions of their own love stories. Unlike the other women in this

37 Ramona Wray, introduction to Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry, ed. Ramona Wray (New York: Arden Early Modern Drama, 2012), 1- 69.

24 study, Wroth's personal life is difficult to parse because her work is almost all literary, so she leaves behind very little of herself directly. I draw a direct line between Wroth’s literary publications and her public identity, because she created her public identity through the act of publishing. Even the fact that she carried on an affair with her married cousin that produced two children, for example, was known and incorporated into her persona.38 Her fiction is the key to the ways in which people understood her life—both during her lifetime, when she was accused of fictionalizing actual events, and today, when her own love life is read into her characters. In addition to troubling the concept of fictional and actual identity, Wroth provides a study in different types of writing, as she published a sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, and a pastoral romance, Urania, and wrote an unpublished closet drama, Love's Victory. Her diverse works create a wide range of writing about women's passions that may connect to her personal life, but more importantly connect Wroth’s fictions to a deep understanding of how to represent female emotions, desires, and sexualities on a public stage. This chapter contrasts the fact that all we have of Wroth’s identity is public and fictionalized to the way she writes female characters with rich internal lives and desires, and the ability to express them in speech, conversation, and print.

Chapter Five, "Varied Speech, Changeable Bodies, and Margaret Cavendish’s

Queer Rhetorical Legacies," connects Cavendish’s desire to be known for her writing and the way she depicts bodies and desires in her writing to explore how she uses both to break normative expectations for women. Cavendish, even more so than Wroth,

38 Margaret P. Hannay, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 194-195, 200, 225, 252-255.

25 wrote widely, as she had her hand in science writing, philosophy, drama, prose, and poetry. She cared deeply about having her name in print, and also attracted a mythos about her shy but flamboyant personality.39 She intentionally created a rhetoric of legacy that allowed her to create the way she was remembered, even when women were not meant to be known for their writing, publishing, knowledge of science, or exploration of the world. Cavendish considered writing to be the defining part of her personal identity, and this allowed her to explore the connections between identity, desire, and womanhood. Though her private life consisted of a happy marriage to a man who was her economic and political superior, her writing is a place for queer women in Renaissance fiction that that otherwise would be closed down through the lens of Renaissance laws or codes of conduct. By analyzing Cavendish's female characters in her well known and partly philosophical Blazing World alongside one of her lesser-known works, Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, this chapter examines her ideas about how women can position themselves, and how she positions herself, in theory, literature, and in desire. I argue that Cavendish’s work and reputation show the desirability of being seen as exceptional instead of conforming to accepted views or societal norms. My dissertation concludes with a methodological assessment, "Negotiating

Gender, Sex, and Writing as Women," which will bring these four women together to show how the choices made in their writing and personal lives can frame women's rhetorical moves through the very differences between their constructions of womanhood and authorship. The ways these women negotiated their own identities as

39 Kate Lilley, introduction to Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), ix-xxxii.

26 people with female bodies, female positions in society, and female sexualities through their writing subverts a masculine field and opens a mode of thinking that helps women to enter this field. Though these women did not create feminist utopias by becoming authors, their repeated desire to be seen as writing women, women of letters, and public voices opens new means for other women to also seek a larger stage for their work and for us to reinterpret the ways that women interact with and play against the rhetorical canon. My conclusion will explore their rhetorical choices and move the conversation forward to examine how women's writing can be a space for women to have a mode of female agency.

27 Chapter 2

ELIZABETH I: ANDROGYNY, DESIRE, AND QUEENSHIP

Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and the third of Henry’s children to take the English throne, exists today as a figurehead, a historical figure, and a woman head-of-state. She is often remembered through the many men who immortalized her in text, from William Shakespeare to Edmund Spenser’s many versions of her in his Faerie Queene, dedicated to her directly:

To the most high, mightie, and magnificent empresse renovvmed for pietie, vertve, and all gratiovs government Elizabeth by the grace of God Qveene of England Fravnce and Ireland and of Virginia, defendovr of the faith, &c. Her most hvmble servavnt Edmvnd Spenser doth in all hvmilitie dedicate, present, and consecrate these his labovers to live with the eternie of her fame.40 His bombastic dedication and the versions of Elizabeth scattered throughout his works make his versions of Elizabeth some of the most recognizable today. Coupled with the images painted of her, Spenser’s virgin queen and Elizabeth’s grandiose image have created a figure that has lasted into much of pop culture today; as David Grant Moss puts it:

Those who wish to evoke a Disneyesque view of Renaissance Britain, those who which to exploit the dramatic possibilities of the ‘woman on top,’ and those who wish to proclaim themselves inheritors of a great cultural tradition, have used and probably will continue to use the

40 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 37.

28 queen’s image to further their goals. She still functions as a symbol of power and authority, ruff, pearls, farthingale, and all.41

Her reign’s period of relative political stability and patronage of the arts mean that Elizabeth is present, at least in the background, in a lot of the art composed under her rule. Elizabeth’s fame also means that she has been preserved in the archival record in a way that many early modern women have been all or partially lost, as much of her life played out publicly for many to watch and record. In other words, Elizabeth is too big of a figure to ignore in history and criticism. Even with this presence in the historical record, there are still men who loom over Elizabeth’s record, like Spenser and William Shakespeare for their literary merits; William Cecil, Lord Burghley for his influence over her policies; and Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, for the scandal he caused are just a few.42 However, Elizabeth I was an important figure who left her mark on England—and left plenty of primary texts, written herself, in the historic record. Roy Strong’s explorations of how Elizabeth controlled her portraiture and likeness document how she asserted her authority through images.43 Here, I show how she used rhetoric in her poetry to create similar constructions of power. In this first chapter, I delve into the way Elizabeth I constructed herself as a woman and a king and the ways she used rhetoric, persuasion, and emotion in the texts she left behind in order to bolster her power and leave her mark on England and the larger world.

41 David Grant Moss, “A Queen for Whose Time? Elizabeth I as Icon for the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Popular Culture 35, no. 5 (2006): 803, https://doi- org.udel.idm.oclc.org/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2006.00306.x.

42 Carole Levin, The Reign of Elizabeth I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

43 Roy C. Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987).

29 One of the most enduring lines attributed to Elizabeth I of England is from later in her life, when allegedly speaking to the British forces as they prepared to take on the Spanish Armada. Taking place in 1588, this speech was meant to rally the troops on the beaches of the coast of Essex who were facing down a clash with the famous Spanish navy after years of difficult relations with Philip II.44 Her speech claims, “I know have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, I have the heart and stomach of a king.”45 This sentence, contrasting the outward shape of womanhood with the inward possession of strength and fortitude necessary for the head-of-state, has come to define Elizabeth I as the virgin queen with strength enough for her whole country even without a spouse or family. Her connections to her father’s best aspects and her refusal to take on a husband who would in any way rule ahead of her allowed Elizabeth to still act as a woman but behave as the ruler of an influential European nation. The distinction between woman and king assumes that the female body cannot, in itself, contain the proper organs, humours, and disposition to rule. Elizabeth sidesteps this by curating her appearance as a competent king, even with womanly trappings. She does this in part by cultivating a connection to her father, Henry VIII, and to his years of relative peace and prosperity after the short reigns of her half- siblings. Louis Montrose elaborates on this connection, showing how Elizabeth built her queenship on defining her legitimacy through connections to Henry VIII

44 Steven W. May, The Folger Shakespeare Library Presents Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 78-79.

45 Elizabeth I, “The Queen’s Speech at Tilbury Camp (Speech 10),” August 9, 1588, reprinted in The Folger Shakespeare Library Presents Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, edited by Steven W. May (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 77.

30 represented in paintings and in deliberate choices meant to mirror his reign.46 After the political and religious confusion of Edward VI and Mary I pulling the country between extreme Protestantism and extreme Catholicism, the mild Anglican church that Elizabeth cultivated worked to connect her to her father and the peace and prosperity his reign meant.47 Elizabeth modified her connections to her gender depending on her goals, choosing to play up either her kingly, masculine qualities when needed or her softer, feminine side. Cheryl Glenn calls this her “androgyny trope,” which allows Elizabeth to “[present] her body natural as feminine and her body politic as masculine whenever she appeared in public to exercise her rhetorical power, an imperial image that was appropriate for a woman yet invited obedience.”48 Through her connections to her father and the masculinity it lends her, Elizabeth is able to walk between feminine body and affect and male political power. While Elizabeth establishes her legitimacy through her connections to the masculinity of her father, her mother Anne Boleyn represented a threat to her reign throughout her childhood and even into her ascendency to the throne. Boleyn’s execution and subsequent the birth of Elizabeth’s half-brother, Edward, cast long shadows on her childhood. Elizabeth was a young child when her mother was executed for trumped-up charges of adultery, and Henry’s next wife was able to provide the male heir that he desperately wanted, which led him to take Elizabeth and

46 Louis Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 19, 33.

47 Carole Levin, The Reign of Elizabeth I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 22.

48 Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition form Antiquity Through the Renaissance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997),168, 163.

31 her much older half-sister Mary out of the line of succession and to declare them bastards.49 While Mary and Elizabeth were both put back into succession, they were never re-legitimized as Henry’s children.50 Unlike Mary, who had a strong bond with her mother, Elizabeth dealt with the negative views surrounding her mother by actively distancing her own legacy from her mother’s, connecting herself publicly with her father’s image instead.51 However, Anne Boleyn’s image as an adulterer and traitor to the crown was a difficult one for Elizabeth to sidestep completely. Elizabeth was able to distance herself from her mother, but Anne Boleyn’s reputation was something she always had to be wary of. Most written scrutiny of Anne Boleyn was composed when she was still a threat to those who opposed her, such as Catholics and political opponents. While this scrutiny mostly passed before Elizabeth took the throne, speculation about Boleyn that cast her as a threat to the monarchy was preserved in text that survived to Elizabeth’s reign. The speculation that surrounded her womb coupled with the private letters that circulated about her status as wife and mother created an atmosphere of suspicion toward Elizabeth that in no way abated when her mother was executed. Eustace Chapuys, ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, was a member of Henry VIII’s court who was known for both his detailed letter writing and his support for

Princess Mary. Because of this support, he had a strong dislike for Anne, referring to

49 Carole Levin, The Reign of Elizabeth I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003): 7.

50 Ibid.

51 Louis Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 14.

32 her often as “the concubine.”52 Chapuys functions as a court member who added to the negative print tradition surrounding the queen, producing condemning texts read by the Emperor and other high-ranking individuals both inside and out of England. He reported the rumor that Henry believed himself to be bewitched by Anne Boleyn, claiming that Henry said in confidence, “that he had made this marriage, seduced by witchcraft, and for this reason he considered it null; and that this was evident because God did not permit them to have any male issue.”53 Anne’s seduction transgressed against God, and their lack of progeny punished both Anne and the king. While G. W. Bernard remarks, “surely his [Henry’s] reference to Anne’s bewitching him was simply a way in which in moments of anger or regret or despair he referred to his past infatuation with Anne,” the fact that the rumor existed and was passed around—in court, through ambassadors to other heads of state, possibly outside of court in England—creates a space of suspicion surrounding Anne Boleyn that includes a charge of witchcraft and God’s condemnation.54 More than this, it challenged Anne’s already precarious position as a second wife and associates Elizabeth directly with the site of God’s disapproval—her mother’s womb. This association casts a pall over Elizabeth, making her a bastard even before the charge is leveled against her after her mother’s death because her conception was one of deception. Though the language

52 199, Eustace Chapuys to Charles V (first printed London, 1887), in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol. X, arranged and catalogued by James Gairdner (Vaduz: Kraus Reprint Ltd., 1965).

53 Ibid.

54 G. W. Bernard, Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 128.

33 that Henry used is not the same as an accusation of witchcraft, the end result is the same: Anne is executed and suspicion is cast on her child. The suspicion cast on her mother creates a situation where Elizabeth actively has to style herself against her legacy, and she does so in part by echoing her father and in part by creating her own power, bolstered by those around her and supported by her language choices. In her use of public speech and her history of humanist education, as well as her patronage for the arts, Elizabeth has become a mainstay in feminist rhetoric scholarship. She is a central figure in Cheryl Glenn’s Rhetoric Retold, where Glenn takes on Elizabeth’s public speeches and often-masculine persona, examining the ways that Elizabeth positions herself as a woman and a ruler, someone simultaneously disenfranchised and the most powerful person in the country. Her chapter on the Renaissance starts with an immediate reference to Elizabeth, calling out her power and her empire to show the reach that an educated woman had during this patriarchal time.55 Her discussion of women’s education looks specifically at the noble women who were able to get a humanist rather than a wife’s education, and includes Elizabeth’s tutor, Robert Ascham, who tutored many noblewomen at the time, and had a direct effect on Elizabeth’s introduction to humanism, languages, and writing.56 Ascham was appointed Elizabeth’s tutor in 1548, and worked with her in part on her languages and translations, which includes reading Demosthenes and Isocrates in

55 Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition form Antiquity Through the Renaissance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 118.

56 Ibid., 130.

34 Greek and later in her life, translating Cicero, Seneca, and Boethius, among others.57 Ascham’s tutelage and connections to the humanist movement give Elizabeth a foundation in rhetoric that many women did not have, as well as a foundation in many languages. She also had a French tutor, Jean Belmaine, who also may have had a hand in her translations—particularly one of John Calvin.58 Even with a childhood broken up by occasional imprisonment, Elizabeth’s education is on par with some of the most educated men of her age, and grants her a full knowledge of rhetoric. After understanding the way that Elizabeth was educated, Glenn turns to depictions of women in fiction, which are often of Elizabeth during her reign.59 Glenn spends most of the rest of the chapter unearthing women from the archives who were not often considered part of the history of rhetoric at the time of publication, but she does have a section focusing on Elizabeth’s manipulation of gendered language as she held the throne, looking at Elizabeth’s speeches and letters to analyze her epideictic rhetoric.60 There is thus a lot of focus on Elizabeth’s writing and influence, and demonstrates the long-term effects Elizabeth has on women’s Renaissance rhetoric. Cristy Beemer updates Glenn’s text with an article focused on the rhetoric of female monarchy,

57 Roger Ellis, “The Juvenile Translations of Elizabeth Tutor,” Translation and Literature 18, no. 2 (Autumn 2009), 159, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20789071.

58 Ibid., 161.

59 Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition form Antiquity Through the Renaissance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 132-133.

60 Ibid., 158-170.

35 examining the language and gender choices of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor.61 Her discussion of Elizabeth examines the way that she mirrored Mary’s choices to lean into stereotypical depictions of women—wives, mothers, and maidens—in order to subvert stereotyped views of them, which Beemer deems apophasis.62 Beemer’s work explores the ways that gender and rhetoric coincide in Elizabeth’s speeches, and how she was still working within a patriarchal framework. Taken together, Glenn and Beemer impress just how important Elizabeth is for the development of feminist rhetoric, and how she clearly fits into a history of rhetoric through her education and speeches. Even as I reassert Elizabeth’s legitimacy in feminist rhetoric work, I do not write this chapter to recover Elizabeth as some kind of proto-feminist from the past. Instead, I work to understand how she used language to structure her gender and her power. Elizabeth can be useful to women today—even when we acknowledge that her reign was not beneficial to the women who lived under her, and actively detrimental to those living in the empire she started—through an analysis of the ways that power and gender intersect, and how we understand her use of femininity and masculinity as masks to grant her greater power and awe and support from others. This chapter works to understand the way that Elizabeth constructed herself—again, not for feminist reasons, but for ways to understand how gender and power can convene and diverge, particularly when one with power is from a disempowered gender. This leads us to try

61 Cristy Beemer, “The Female Monarchy: A Rhetorical Strategy of Early Modern Rule.” Rhetoric Review 30, no. 3 (2011): 258-274, https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2011.581937.

62 Ibid., 259.

36 to understand how gender was weaponized against her. While commenting on Carole Levin’s assessment of slander against Elizabeth in Heart and Stomach of a King, Natalie Mears argues:

However, cases or sexual slander and defamation amongst ordinary Elizabethans demonstrate the ultimately limited vocabulary for criticising women. By calling Elizabeth a ‘whore,’ her subjects may not, as Levin has argued, have identified her gender as ‘the most salient aspect of her entity as a ruler,’ but rather have used it to criticise her queenship for other reasons. Elizabeth’s gender may only have shaped the (limited) choice of insult and not reflected the cause.63 Mears’ assessment of the “limited vocabulary for criticising women” is certainly correct, and her concern that Levin focuses too tightly on Elizabeth’s gender outside of other mitigating factors that may be worthy of critique is valid. Both authors, taken together, speak to a larger, systemic devaluation of women, either in the criticism leveled at them or the ways that it is expressed. In other words, though insulting Elizabeth for her gender or sexual proclivities might bely a whole host of other problems with their leadership or actions, choosing to use this insult in text is a gendered decision that criticizes them both for their actions and their inherent womanhood. It is also a problem that still exists today, and examining how Elizabeth uses her own gender to define her power as queen grants readers tactics that can still help them to counter such criticism today. In addition, a limit in language to critique a female ruler points to the limited resources Elizabeth had to bolster power in a female body. She used her father’s image, a masculine expression of her power, and, eventually, a consolidation of religious power as “Supreme Governor” of the Church

63 Natalie Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 227-228.

37 of England to circumvent the limitations placed upon her.64 Many around her were tentative about a woman taking over as Head of the Church, so Elizabeth called herself Governor to avoid offending those opposed. However, she framed her decision as one to not take away from Christ’s position as head of the Church, and thus sidestepped a gendered undermining of her power by reframing the terms of conversation—all while retaining the same amount of power over the Church and country as her father.65 When her gender would limit the insults used against her or the opportunities presented to her, Elizabeth was able to use language to sidestep any limitations on her abilities, getting the Church and the government to co-sign her decisions. Elizabeth wielded her power through her gender, both masculine and feminine, and through the ways that she linked her education and her writing to her power, her gender, and her religious right. Her work shows that rhetoric and power can be used, even for those that should have less power through the composition of their bodies and understanding of their genders. I examine her poetry, working to connect rhetorical analyses of her speeches to the poetic form she often used for slightly more private conversations. Using Susan Jarratt’s concept of mythos, the connection between rhetoric and literature later pushed out of our modern understanding of rhetoric, I extend their readings and history of Elizabeth into her poetry.66 As poetry was often circulated in manuscript form to many, giving a private, in-group feel to publicly

64 Carole Levin, The Reign of Elizabeth I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 23- 24.

65 Ibid.

66 Susan C. Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), xxii.

38 available texts, Elizabeth’s poetry gives a more private-feeling vehicle for Elizabeth’s use of rhetoric.67 Working with these understandings of the connections between rhetoric and assumptions of private writing, I build a connection between Elizabeth’s poetry and the rhetorical readings of her speeches and letters, demonstrating her use of kairos and understanding of audience even when writing about her personal emotions in verse. Cristy Beemer examines the kairos used by Elizabeth in her letters that ask Mary I for mercy and in the letters used to ask her for mercy written by Mary, Queen of Scots.68 Beemer explores the play between power and powerlessness in the language used to call for mercy, using letters as another entry into Elizabeth’s use of rhetoric. Beemer’s work connects Elizabeth’s often precarious positions earlier in her life with the power she develops later, and uses kairos to bridge these gaps. In the next section, I explore Elizabeth’s relationships in poetry to two important women during her reign: her half-sister, Mary Tudor, Queen Mary I; and Mary Stuart, also known as Mary, Queen of Scots. I then analyze her poetry where she uses her female desire as a conduit to discuss larger issues of power and diplomacy. In these two sections, I analyze her poetry for their use of rhetoric and the kairos and apophasis contained within them. I finish this chapter with a brief discussion of the usefulness of Elizabeth to modern readers.

67 Jennifer Summit, “‘The Arte of a Ladies Penne’: Elizabeth I and the Poetics of Queenship,” English Literary Renaissance 26, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 411, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43447528.

68 Cristy Beemer, “God Save the Queen: Kairos and the Mercy Letters of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots,” Rhetoric Review 35, no. 2 (2016): 75-90, https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2016.1142803.

39 Princely Bonds, Power, and Kairos in Poetry Addressed to Women Elizabeth’s poetry works in similar ways to her speeches, advocating for her in public opinion through a narrower audience and different medium, but still persuading her audience to respect her choices and ideas. This section breaks down the ways she negotiated power with other women who had power—her half-sister, Queen Mary I, and Mary, Queen of Scots, a cousin and fellow royal who also happened to be a legitimate Catholic rival for her own throne. Elizabeth’s poetry aimed at her relatives, fellow women, and adversaries does not just exist for them or about them. Elizabeth, by necessity, wrote her work knowing full well that it would become public knowledge without having to publish her work directly. Jennifer Summit’s “Elizabeth I and the Poetics of Queenship” opens by contradicting the view that Renaissance poetry was inherently “masculine” with a discussion of contemporary understandings of several of Elizabeth’s poems.69 Summit’s work looks at Elizabeth’s poem “The Doubt of Future Foes,” particularly through the lens of George Puttenham’s analysis included in his The Arte of Poesie, where he calls her work the paragon of English poetry.70 I open with Summit’s views because they demonstrate both the state of early scholarship on Elizabeth as a writer and not just a figurehead, and because they showcase the importance of opaque language in Elizabeth’s work. Elizabeth is difficult to parse in modern scholarship in part because her writing is preserved in manuscripts, often recorded by others.71 While she still wrote knowing that others

69 Jennifer Summit, “‘The Arte of a Ladies Penne’: Elizabeth I and the Poetics of Queenship,” English Literary Renaissance 26, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 395-422, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43447528.

70 Ibid., 395.

71 Ibid., 396.

40 would read (and read into) her texts, she did not have the option of choosing to keep her writing private or restricted to a particular audience, because most likely much of the court would have access to it, and it could get published by others—such as “The Doubt of Future Foes,” which was in Puttenham’s The Arte of Poesie. Because of this lack of privacy, Elizabeth’s writing is purposely opaque in order to show and conceal in equal measures her thoughts and feelings, revealing those that were strategic only. This is seen in the power and the diplomacy in “The Doubt of Future Foes,” but also even in “Verses Written With a Diamond,” in which a young, imprisoned allegedly Elizabeth composed two lines of verse and carved them in to the walls that contained her. In this section, I close read these two poems and connect them to the feminist rhetoric readings done on her other works that most easily fit into the rhetorical canon, such as speeches and letters. With Summit’s discussion of poetics as a guide and Glenn and Beemer’s conceptualizations of Elizabeth as a rhetor, I add to our understanding of Elizabeth her poetry, and how it connects to the rhetorical choices made in her letters and speeches. Underlying all this is her manipulation of gender, using rhetorical methods to affirm and deny her femaleness as she affirms and denies her own feelings. Elizabeth’s “Verses Written With a Diamond” extends Beemer’s discussion of the kairos present in Elizabeth’s mercy letter to Mary Tudor, not just convincing Mary to spare her life but also arguing for her innocence to be accepted by their wider community. The poem was written while Elizabeth was being held in Woodstock during Mary’s reign because of the Protestant plot to dethrone Mary, which implicated

41 Elizabeth mainly because of her closeness to the throne.72 Beemer analyzes the ways that Elizabeth, when imprisoned in the Tower of London by her half sister at the beginning of Mary’s reign, wrote her a hasty letter to plead for her life.73 Emphasizing their close blood connection and Elizabeth’s own power while connecting Mary to the title of prince and the men who have worn the title previously, Elizabeth uses antanagoge to turn negative conceptions of her powerful writing to a positive, and paradigma to emphasize Mary’s connection to a tradition of kings.74 Using the urgency of the moment to demonstrate authenticity of the writing and the bond between writer and king, Elizabeth’s letter to Mary shows the ways that she took advantage of the kairos available to her as she wrote.75 Extending this discussion, Elizabeth’s poem also takes advantage of a slightly shifted situation, still capitalizing on antanagoge to convince Mary and the world at large to take her innocence seriously. Elizabeth’s “Verses Written With a Diamond” communicates the urgency and delicacy of life and death situations with a focus on her status as prisoner and her innocence throughout. While Beemer documents the urgency of the letter written to Mary, Elizabeth’s “Verses Written with a Diamond” was allegedly written (with a diamond, of course) during her imprisonment at Woodstock, after her release from the

72 Steven W. May, The Folger Shakespeare Library Presents Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 4.

73 Cristy Beemer, “God Save the Queen: Kairos and the Mercy Letters of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots,” Rhetoric Review 35.2 (2016): 75-90.

74 Ibid., 80.

75 Ibid.

42 Tower. Writers such as John Foxe published the poem with the diamond title in several contemporary publications, making the poem not just a personal protest between two women as the letter was, but a public statement about her imprisonment.76 Instead of the urgency conveyed in the letter, it focuses on Elizabeth herself:

Much suspected by me, Nothing proved can be. Quod Elizabeth the prisoner.77 The poem, brief as it is, remains vague in details but clearly casts Elizabeth as wronged—she is suspected without proof and held captive. The simple rhyme in the first two lines makes the “prisoner” identifier stand out even more as the last line. As the circumstances surrounding the writing of the poem and the letter differ, so too does the kairos invoked in the writing. Juliet Fleming’s definition of posy, taking from George Puttenham’s discussion of poetry, defines the poems as short works written to mark an occasion on unusual surfaces.78 Posy is a visual art, taking advantage of form and using it as argument, and therefore tends to be more simplistic in language because it is portable and attached to its shape and medium. Puttenham calls the poems “for the nones,” as “nones” was a nonsense word meant to fill space, just as

76 Steven W. May, The Folger Shakespeare Library Presents Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 4.

77 Elizabeth I, “Verses Written with a Diamond (Poem 2),” (1555), reprinted in The Folger Shakespeare Library Presents Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, edited by Steven W. May (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 4.

78 Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 20.

43 posy does.79 As a short poem written on a permanent space, “Verses” works as a posy, taking advantage of the materials available to permanently mark the space with Elizabeth’s innocence. As Elizabeth’s earlier letter, by necessity, focuses on the relationship between her and Mary, particularly Mary’s power over Elizabeth, “Verses” focuses on the indignities of imprisonment. The lack of trust between the sisters was built in part by their religious divide and in part because of the fact that Elizabeth’s own mother was the reason Mary was made illegitimate and her mother divorced.80 Her poem works, then, to push back against accusations that she harbored ill will against her sister. The move of signing the poem “Elizabeth the prisoner” works against the forceful language Beemer identifies in her letter—instead of declaring her innocence through a connection of blood, the move instead deliberately lowers Elizabeth’s position, identifying her as prisoner rather than princess. Using “quod” as a sign-off positions Elizabeth as a speaker, giving her agency even as her imprisonment denies it to her. She severs the link between herself and Mary, perhaps because, as Beemer mentions, Mary allegedly never read Elizabeth’s letter from the Tower.81 No longer in fear of her life and imprisoned in the same place where her mother lost her head, Elizabeth can focus instead on the indignities of being accused rather than pleading for release.

There is still some aggression and authority in the poem, as the line “nothing proved

79 Ibid., 22.

80 Cristy Beemer, “God Save the Queen: Kairos and the Mercy Letters of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots,” Rhetoric Review 35, no. 2 (2016): 77, https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2016.1142803.

81 Ibid., 82.

44 can be” almost seems to wink at the idea of innocence—it is not that Elizabeth did nothing, but that nothing can be proved about her. This strength almost teases the idea of her as a prisoner, as it does nothing to prove her innocence. She once again calls on antanagoge, turning the negativity of the lack of addressing her innocence into a positive—nothing is proved, and her innocence will win out one way or another. She does not take the space in the tiny poem to prove herself, but instead waits for her virtues to win out over any potential doubt. It is not the goal of the poem to prove herself innocent, it is to weather the course of the accusations against her. Like an etching on the window, Elizabeth’s innocence is permanent and will win out over years trying to weather or fade it. Moreover, her strength is emphasized by the reference to the diamond and the use of the diamond to write the poem. Her permanence and resilience are mirrored by the materials embodied by the poem, as the title itself honors the way the poem came to be. As Elizabeth did not have power over publication, the release of this poem is another way that she could passively take advantage of kairos while still appearing innocent and not circulating her works directly. “Verses Written with a Diamond” was printed in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, a collection of Protestant martyrs updated often and used to hold Catholics accountable for violent retaliations against

Protestants.82 Foxe was the one who added the title, and he was invested in Elizabeth’s resilience in the face of Catholic Mary’s unjust persecution.83 Writing a poem on a window, and then a publication in a public and highly popular text helps Elizabeth to

82 Steven W. May, The Folger Shakespeare Library Presents Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 4.

83 Ibid.

45 capitalize on the kairos of her poem. A permanent mark on a temporary prison immortalizes the injustice visited upon Elizabeth, as does the publication of the poem. She makes her words and speech permanent through her actions, and through choices that she did not even need to make directly. Elizabeth cannot take credit for that, but she was aware enough of the fact that she is a public figure and her arrest would be well known to write something that would be documented publicly. Documenting manuscript culture used in court, Summit documents the popularity of manuscript circulation among women and the upper class in general, mentioning the ways that “coterie poets” could give audiences a feel of privacy even when sharing work widely.84 While in this case, the poem actually appeared in print, trusting others to publish her work without her direct intervention creates a similar feel, giving those reading Foxe’s work a privileged glimpse into Elizabeth’s life without her having to reach out to an audience directly. Elizabeth used her poem to communicate her innocence, all the while never directly countering the claims against her and counting on others’ to make the connection for her. John Foxe’s Actes and monuments of these latter and perilous dayes touching matters of the Church includes “Verses Written on the Diamond,” creating further credibility for Elizabeth by placing her in conversation with martyrs to the Protestant cause and granting her argument for innocence a wider audience. The poem helps enhance the section about Elizabeth’s suffering during Mary’s reign. Under the title “The Miraculous Preservation of Lady Elizabeth, now Queen of England, from

84 Jennifer Summit, “‘The Arte of a Ladies Penne’: Elizabeth I and the Poetics of Queenship,” English Literary Renaissance 26, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 409-410, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43447528.

46 Extreme Calamity and Danger of Life, in the Time of Queen Mary, her Sister,” written in 1563, Foxe details the conditions that made Elizabeth both a devoted Protestant worthy of respect and nearly a martyr because of her close brush with death.85 Foxe extolls Elizabeth’s individual virtues, from her modesty to her education, and details the ways she was treated poorly at the hands of her Catholic sister. He first details her qualities, starting with extended comparisons of her personal modesty to the flashiness of Mary Tudor and her aunt Mary de Guise, the Catholic Scottish queen and mother of Mary Stuart, later Mary, Queen of Scots. Compared to the gaudy apparel of the Catholic queens, the young Elizabeth contrasts by listening to “the words of Paul and Peter, well considered true nobility to consist not in circumstances of the body but in substance of the heart; not in such things which deck the body but in that which dignifieth the mind.”86 Foxe emphasizes Elizabeth’s devotion to holy texts, defining her as much more pious than her riches-obsessed Catholic counterparts. In addition, though, Foxe also draws the line that Elizabeth herself often drew: the line between body and mind or body and heart. In Foxe’s case, he draws the line between trusting what the body shows and how it is adorned versus the truth contained in the heart and the mind, marking those who are most modest as most noble. Foxe justifies Elizabeth’s inclusion in his text through her inner nobility and the ways she shows this through her command of words and language. He enhances

85 John Foxe, Actes and monuments of these latter and perilous dayes touching matters of the Church (London: John Day, 1563), reprinted in Elizabeth I and her Age: Authoritative Texts, Commentary and Criticism, edited by Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009), 37.

86 Ibid.

47 her nobility by remarking upon her education, quoting two of her tutors to show the intellectual ability that came to Elizabeth naturally:

I will tell what hath been heard of her first schoolmaster [William Grindal], a man very honest and learned, who reported of her to a friend of his that he learned every day more of her than she of whim, which, when it seemed to him a mystery (and indeed it was)…For sayeth he, ‘I think she is the best inclined and disposed of any in all Europe.87

Foxe emphasizes both her education and her natural abilities, claiming that she was able to instruct her teacher because of her natural talents and proclivity toward learning—thus proving the nobility that lies within her. Foxe also verifies that Elizabeth came close to being a martyr herself at the hands of her sister, “For there was no more behind to make a very Iphigenia of her but her offering up upon the altar of the scaffold.”88 Foxe conflates the altar and the scaffold, and puts Elizabeth just one step away from death, justifying her desire to immortalize herself as innocent and mark herself unjustly imprisoned. Foxe’s work grants legitimacy to Elizabeth’s desire to be seen as a prisoner and nearly a martyr, and as he makes her appear more holy and closer to those who died for faith before her, he plays up the differences between her and her Catholic counterparts. His claims about her, coupled with her own work, enhance the kairos in the poem itself, creating a situation with Elizabeth is taken seriously as a Protestant, a pseudo-martyr, and an innocent, imprisoned woman. Young Elizabeth took advantage of kairos in her letter to her sister, arguing for her life, and in her poetry, using her surroundings to promote her innocence. Once she

87 Ibid., 38.

88 Ibid., 39.

48 came into her full power on the throne, she continued to capitalize on the implied privacy of her poetry to convince others of her control. Like “Verses Written with a Diamond,” “The Doubt of Future Foes” also corresponds with a contentious part of Elizabeth’s life—this time, the custody and eventual execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Glenn briefly mentions this poem in Rhetoric Retold, using it as an example of the good poetry that Elizabeth has written alongside her rhetorically relevant speeches and letters.89 I expand on her brief remarks here, showing how Elizabeth also capitalizes on persuasion and kairos to elevate herself above the rumors created by Mary’s presence in England. In her analysis of mercy letters, Beemer evaluates one of Mary’s letters to Elizabeth, which, unlike Elizabeth’s letter to her sister, was read by the addressee.90 This letter, written in 1582 (so the exchange that Beemer discusses takes place after “Doubt” was written), capitalizes on the relationship the women developed through writing. It asks Elizabeth to consider their bonds and ignore any potential rumors about her political involvement in England.91 “The Doubt of Future Foes” details their interactions from Elizabeth’s perspective, showing what a fine line Elizabeth walked in their interactions and she walked in what she chose to reveal to others. Beemer analyzes Mary’s letter to Elizabeth, but “The Doubt of Future Foes” is Elizabeth’s take on the situation. I reproduce it in full here:

89 Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition form Antiquity Through the Renaissance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 170.

90 Cristy Beemer, “God Save the Queen: Kairos and the Mercy Letters of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots,” Rhetoric Review 35, no. 2 (2016): 85, https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2016.1142803.

91 Ibid., 84-85.

49 The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy, And wit me warns to shun such snares as threatens mine annoy, For falsehood now doth flow, and subjects’ faith doth ebb, Which should not be, if reason ruled or wisdom weaved the web. But clouds of joys untried do cloak aspiring minds, Which turns to rain of late repent, by changèd course of winds. The top of hope supposed, the root of rue shall be, And fruitless all their grafted guile, as shortly you shall see. Their dazzled eyes with pride, which great ambition blinds, Shall be unsealed by worthy wights whose foresight falsehood finds. The daughter of debate, that discord aye doth sow Shall reap no gain where former rule still peace hath taught to know. No foreign banished wight shall anchor in this port: Our realm brooks no seditious sects, let them elsewhere resort. My rusty sword through rest shall first his edge employ To poll their tops who seek such change or gape for future joy.92

The poem works to break those who believe Mary Stuart’s lies away from her, to undermine the support she may have gathered with accusations of misconduct and falsehoods. The poem starts with personal connection between Elizabeth and a perceived foe—a future foe, who may look like an ally or friendly face for now. She then moves into nature metaphors to widen her scope, viewing her subjects as affected by “changèd course of winds” and pulled away from her. The poem’s ending prognosticates Mary Stuart’s, as Elizabeth violently defends her rights to her lands and her subjects, “pull[ing] tops” with a “rusty sword.” By the end of the poem, she regains power over her country and subjects by violently dispelling their foes. “Doubt,” taken together with the letter written after it, shows the danger Elizabeth felt with Mary nearby as well as the issue created by potentially executing another political leader. Beemer shows Mary’s use of anacoenosis and paraenesis in

92 Elizabeth I, “The Doubt of Future Foes (Poem 4),” (roughly 1570s), reprinted in The Folger Shakespeare Library Presents Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, edited by Steven W. May (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 7.

5 0 her letter, asking opinions of readers and forecasting impending doom respectively, along with grouping herself in with Elizabeth in a group of princes.93 Both the letter and the poem place Mary and Elizabeth within a larger group of kings, deliberately reminding Elizabeth that both are a part of the same powerful group—one that is almost always defined by maleness.94 Elizabeth and Mary, then, are anomalies in the same select group, which Mary counts on to appeal to Elizabeth. Elizabeth uses the same tactic to discuss her own approach to Mary, but interprets the connection differently. Though Elizabeth acknowledges Mary’s kingship in her lines “The daughter of debate, that discord aye doth slow,/ Shall reap no gain where former rule still peace hath taught to grow,” the next line unties her from her land and thus reduces her from a leader to a “wight”: “No foreign banished wight shall anchor in this port:/ Our realm brooks no seditious sects—let them elsewhere resort.” Elizabeth refers to Mary’s power directly, but makes it clear immediately that Mary is no longer in the same company as she: her rule is “former” and in the next line, she is “foreign” and “banished,” and reduced to just a person (wight). Elizabeth’s poem anticipates Mary’s argument and undermines it, cutting Mary from her land and therefore from her royalty and her company. Despite Elizabeth’s denials in “Doubt,” Mary emphasizes her connection to

Elizabeth throughout her letter, drawing on it to sow doubt on Elizabeth’s ability to condemn Mary even as she acts against her in her own country. Mary writes in her

93 Cristy Beemer, “God Save the Queen: Kairos and the Mercy Letters of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots,” Rhetoric Review 35, no. 2 (2016): 82, 85, https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2016.1142803.

94 Ibid., 84-85.

51 letter that “you will set a very bad example to the other princes of Christendom, to act toward their subjects with the same rigour that you will show to me, a sovereign queen, and your nearest relation, which I am.”95 Elizabeth uses similar language in her speeches to Parliament, calling out their blood connection and princely connection even as she weighs Mary’s potential participation in a plot against her life and later, her own choice to have her executed: “I protest it is and hath been my grievous though that one not different in sex, of like estate, and my near kin should fall into so great a crime.”96 Elizabeth almost pushes Mary’s words back upon her, appearing distressed that Mary could use their connections against her. These words come back again in her next speech to Parliament, when she considers having to execute Mary: “What will they not now say when it shall be spread that, for the safety of her life, a maiden Queen could be content to spill the blood even of her own kinswoman?”97 Both Mary and Elizabeth acknowledge shared blood, shared royalty, and shared gender in their appeals, and Elizabeth uses these shared features in her talks to Parliament—first to

95 From Cristy Beemer, “God Save the Queen: Kairos and the Mercy Letters of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots,” Rhetoric Review 35, no. 2 (2016): 85, https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2016.1142803.

96 Elizabeth I, “The First Answer to the New Parliament Concerning Mary Stuart (November 12, 1586),” in The copie of a letter to the Right Honourable the Earle of Leycester (London: Christopher Barker, 1586), reprinted in Elizabeth I and her Age: Authoritative Texts, Commentary and Criticism, edited by Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009), 349.

97 Elizabeth I, “The Second Answer Made by the Queen’s Majesty (November 24, 1586),” in The copie of a letter to the Right Honourable the Earle of Leycester (London: Christopher Barker, 1586), reprinted in Elizabeth I and her Age: Authoritative Texts, Commentary and Criticism, edited by Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009), 352.

52 express dismay at Mary’s actions, and then to express dismay at the actions they call upon her. Elizabeth takes up a shared gender and expresses concerns with her actions openly, and these concerns are seen in the poem as well. Elizabeth’s hesitance to execute Mary demonstrates that she did in fact agree with this sentiment—there was a fear present of overstepping her bounds when it came to Mary, which in part was why she lived so long in England before her execution. Despite this hesitance, though, Elizabeth still used her poem to undermine the connection between herself and Mary, breaking her away from her reign, emphasizing her lack of country, and pointing out that she is stranded in England and dependent on Elizabeth’s good will. As both Elizabeth’s speeches and poem refer to the bond between the women, “Doubt” capitalizes on the kairos of poetry by forecasting the negative and predicting retribution to those able to read it. As “Doubt” was also widely published in another text, this time George Puttenham’s The Arte of Poesie, many were able to include themselves in this audience while Elizabeth could deny intent to publish all she wanted.98 This plausible deniability allows Elizabeth to reach a wide audience and cast aspersions on Mary’s character. While Mary is never named in the poem, she is referenced explicitly and cut away from the bond that her later letter attempts to point out. In direct contrast to the Catholic plots against her rule, Elizabeth undermines the connection between them, calling Mary a “future foe,” a “daughter of discord” and divorcing her from the other “princes of Christendom.” “The Doubt of Future Foes” works throughout the poem to disconnect Elizabeth from the very connection that

98 Jennifer Summit, “‘The Arte of a Ladies Penne’: Elizabeth I and the Poetics of Queenship,” English Literary Renaissance 26, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 395, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43447528.

53 Mary later makes, associating Mary instead with division, discord, and violence. Using the paraenesis that Mary later twists against her, Elizabeth forecasts future discord from her future foe. Her language at the end of the poem promises violence only to make herself the harbinger of doom, the one who will “poll” the “tops” of those who stand against her. Elizabeth uses the form to show the violence that she is capable of, and the mistakes those who stand against her make. In addition, Summit showcases the ways that both Elizabeth and Mary make use of ship metaphors in their communications about and to each other.99 As in “Doubt,” where Elizabeth claims, “No foreign banished wight shall anchor in this port,” the language of ships comes in part from Mary’s use of a Petrarchan ship as “a means of figuring her own fear and helplessness as effects of desire.”100 Elizabeth casts this ship away from English shores, but Mary’s use of the language of desire is met with violence and force. Circulating a poem such as this one allows Elizabeth to reframe the narrative and the connection between herself and Mary, giving herself power and pushing back against those who support Mary over her.

Gender, Flirtation, and Kingship While Elizabeth’s poems about conflicts with other women call attention to and then deny claims of shared power and lineage and present her as someone either with or without power as the situation allows, her poems to and about men deal with power and gender even more directly—not just granting power with an acknowledgement of a shared “princely” history, but acknowledging her power as

99 Ibid., 416-418.

100 Ibid.,415.

54 prince and her body as female directly. Particularly when affairs of the heart are involved, Elizabeth often walked the line of masculine power and feminine coyness, her persona torn between portraying herself as another woman affected by love and a king in charge of her country. Moving too far one way or the other would make her either not relatable as a woman, appearing too cold to those around her; or too weak as a king, appearing unable to hold on to her title and the throne in the face of a male lover. In these cases, Elizabeth used many different ways of communicating her power and her desire: letters to and about her paramours and potential husbands, speeches to Parliament communicating her desire to marry or against marriage and her lack of concern about an heir from her own body, and poems to and about her desires, relationships, and choices. Like her letters and her speeches, Elizabeth’s poems are also documents meant for at least one other reader, and likely would make it to the public. Elizabeth knew that she would be granted very little privacy with many of her writings; though they may not be available to the public at large, most of her court would know of her work because of manuscript circulation. Summit mentions that Elizabeth used the term “blabb” while talking to Parliament about her conversations with Mary, Queen of Scots.101 The term “[characterizes] women’s public speech as a sexually unbecoming activity,” and was often connected to the shame of publication.102 While the last section documents ways that Elizabeth got around any shame in publication by having her poems appear in others’ publications, this section focuses on poems that had more defined audiences and spoke more directly for

101 Ibid., 413.

102 Ibid.

55 Elizabeth’s desires. While exposing her private conversations might make her a “blabb,” disguising them in poetry meant for a select few allows her to spread her desires without speaking too publicly. These poems also exemplify rhetorical tactics meant to display her persona to those around her, and toe the line between human woman and powerful king. This section details the ways that Elizabeth walked this line in her poetry, effectively using kairos to communicate who she wanted to be in the eyes of her court and controlling the ways that she would be perceived. I first examine her verse exchange with Ralegh, who was not a romantic interest but still demonstrates the ways that Elizabeth used gender and power to manipulate the men around her. Next, I turn to “On Monsieur’s Departure,” a poem about a betrothal that never came to be, examining the ways that she presents herself as both willing and unwilling to go through with it, depending on the most strategic choice for her throne and her country. As an unmarried woman without a biological heir, Elizabeth’s work to keep her throne was constantly a power struggle. Using writing as one way to control perceptions, either in her court or in England at large, Elizabeth crafted a version of herself that leaned on stereotypes of women and belied them to give herself power and relatability as she occupied the highest position in the land.

While most of Elizabeth’s interactions with men in her court were not sexual, she still used the sexualized language afforded to her by her image as an eligible woman with power to manipulate their perception of her; apophasis meant to humanize her while asserting her dominance all at once. Elizabeth’s verse exchange with Sir Walter Ralegh demonstrates the ways that she used writing to control those in the court around her. Using her sexuality deliberately as she flirts with a male figure in

56 her space, she nevertheless still puts him in his place and speaks to him in the language he initiates—verse:

Fortune hath taken thee away, my love, My life’s joy and my soul’s heaven above; Fortune hath taken thee away, my princess, My world’s delight and my true fancy’s mistress.

Fortune hath taken thee away from me, Fortune hath taken all by taking thee; Dead to all joys, I only live to woe, So Fortune now becomes my fancy’s foe.

In vain mine eyes, in vain you waste your tears, In vain my sighs, the smokes of my despairs, In vain you search the earth and heavens above, In vain you search, for fortune keeps my love.

Then will I leave my love in Fortune’s hands, Then will I leave my love in worthless bands, And only love the sorrows due to me; Sorrow, henceforth that shall my princess be,

And only joy that Fortune conquers kings, Fortune that rules on earth and earthly things Hath ta’en my love in spite of virtue’s might: So blind a goddess did never virtue right.

With wisdom’s eyes had but blind Fortune seen, Then had my love, my love forever been; But love, farewell, though Fortune conquer thee, No Fortune base shall ever alter me.103 Ralegh’s plea to Elizabeth casts her in the role of lover, claiming that fickle Fortune has separated him from her. His almost obsessive focus on Fortune throughout the

103 Sir Walter Ralegh, “Sir Walter Ralegh to the Queen (Poem 7a),” (1587), reprinted in The Folger Shakespeare Library Presents Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, edited by Steven W. May (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 14-15.

57 poem casts the allegory as the main actor, forcing Ralegh and his lover apart and ignoring his plight. The simple AABB rhyme scheme keeps the focus on Ralegh’s despair, and he even goes so far as to excuse Fortune’s guile over Elizabeth by claiming that “Fortune conquers kings,” even as he asserts that “no Fortune base shall ever alter me,” almost cheekily positioning himself as the most virtuous in the poem. As Ralegh despairs being replaced as Elizabeth’s favorite, he plays up their connection and leaves out the intervening earl of Essex who took his favor away. 104 He speaks to Elizabeth as a straying lover, someone who he has pledged his life and devotion to who he has been taken from him by forces outside of his control. With a woman at the helm of the country, Ralegh disputes his political fate by advancing on her as a lover, speaking to her as a woman rather than a king. He reduces her power, claiming that Fortune is the one who controls their lives, and who has kept Elizabeth from realizing that Ralegh cannot reach her any longer. In short, he minimizes Elizabeth in the poem, perhaps in part to avoid insulting her with his distaste toward his current situation. Regardless of his intentions, his words work to cast Elizabeth as an object rather than an actor in his poem, one affected by Fortune but unable to resist it. By asserting that it is Fortune, rather than Elizabeth or her affections for Essex, who put him in a position far away from her, he sidesteps accusing Elizabeth of putting him in the place he so disagrees with—according to the poem, any place far from her. Elizabeth counter to this, however, is to reassert her power, chiding Ralegh for assuming that anyone other than her could orchestrate their circumstances while keeping up the flirtatious tone that he instills in the first poem:

104 Steven W. May, The Folger Shakespeare Library Presents Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 17.

58 Ah, silly Pug, wert thou so sore afraid? Mourn not, my Wat, nor be thou so dismayed; It passeth fickle Fortune’s power and skill To force my heart to think thee any ill.

No Fortune base, thou sayest, shall alter thee; And my so blind a wretch then conquer me? No, no, my pug, though Fortune, were not blind, Assure thyself she could not rule my mind.

Ne chose I thee by foolish Fortune’s rede, Ne can she make me alter with such speed, But must thou needs sour sorrow’s servant be, If that to try thy mistress jest with thee.

Fortune, I grant, sometimes doth conquer kings, And rules and reigns on earth and earthly things, But never think that Fortune can bear sway, If virtue watch, and will her not obey.

Pluck up thy heart, suppress thy brackish tears, Torment thee not, but put away thy fears. Thy love, thy joy, she loves no worthless bands, Much less to be in reeling Fortune’s hands.

Dead to all joys and living unto woe, Slain quite by her that never gave wisemen blow, Revive again and live without all dread, The less afraid the better shalt thou speed.105 Elizabeth counters Ralegh’s flirting by using her own pet names for him, instituting a power differential between them while still keeping up the image that they are lovers. While Ralegh equalizes them under the power of a Fortune who truly controls the situation, Elizabeth creates space between herself and Ralegh by only acknowledging

105 Elizabeth I, “An Answer (Poem 7b),” (1587), reprinted in The Folger Shakespeare Library Presents Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, edited by Steven W. May (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 16-17.

59 him with pet names rather than addressing him directly—minimizing his presence in the poem as he did to her. In addition, she answers his accusations directly by mentioning the fact that “Fortune I grant, sometimes doth conquer kings” in echo of Ralegh’s poem, and keeping his rhyme scheme and focus on Fortune. In doing so, though, she opens space for a new actor, rendering Ralegh’s complaints and “brackish tears” silly. She proceeds to call out his choice to include Fortune in their relationship; while perhaps hoping to avoid accusing Elizabeth directly of orchestrating his situation, Elizabeth firmly refutes the influence of Fortune and tells Ralegh that she has been in control the whole time: “No, no, my Pug, though Fortune, were not blind,/ Assure thyself she could not rule my mind.” She makes it clear that it is her choice, rather than any kind of accidental fate, that caused the rift between them. While keeping the flirtation in place, she assumes a position of authority in their relationship, one that would be otherwise denied a woman in a typical heterosexual bond. Despite insistence that wives are subservient to husbands, Elizabeth plays both the flirtatious woman and dominant partner in one. Elizabeth shows off her power by teasing Ralegh but still putting him in his place—one that is distinctly below hers, as she is the figure orchestrating their choices rather than being affected by it. In both iterations of the poem, Ralegh is powerless, but Elizabeth uses her own verse to demonstrate that she was never out of control, that she and Ralegh are never on the same level. Glenn documents Elizabeth’s meticulous control over epideictic rhetoric: “Elizabeth transforms nearly every recorded rhetorical occasion into an epideictic one that creates and sustains a mood, a decision, and

60 action: hers.”106 She goes on to call Elizabeth a “benevolent despot” to her audiences and acknowledge her adaptability toward rhetorical situations.107 Glenn’s only other references to epideictic rhetoric are in the context of funeral oratory, so she calls attention to Elizabeth’s epideictic power as an example of her devotion to both ceremony and expressing individual virtues and credentials—in most versions, the person being eulogized, but in this case, Elizabeth herself.108 This epideictic power and despotic positioning are on full display in her poem to Ralegh, as she positions her audience (Ralegh, of course, but also others who encounter the poem) as beneath her power and perhaps unable to see the benefits of the choices that she made. Elizabeth is reframed as someone who has the virtues and ability necessary to make the hard choices needed, even if they separate the lovers of Ralegh and herself, which Ralegh is lamenting. She mentions her abilities directly:

Fortune, I grant, sometimes doth conquer kings, And rules and reigns on earth and earthly things, But never think that Fortune can bear sway, If virtue watch, and will her not obey.

Elizabeth asserts her capacity to watch against the forces of Fortune, even if there are “kings” and “reigns” that have succumbed to her powers. Her fortitude is stronger than those who fall to her, keeping “watch” through the “virtues” that she possesses. With vigilance and virtue, Fortune can be overcome. Elizabeth, then, argues for her own abilities while convincing Ralegh that, regardless of whether Fortune or Elizabeth has

106 Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition form Antiquity Through the Renaissance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 165.

107 Ibid.

108 Ibid., 41 and 184.

61 the helm, he is still powerless. However, in Elizabeth’s version, he should not be saddened or afraid, because she is the one in charge. Where Ralegh paints Fortune as fickle and uncaring, Elizabeth paints herself as virtuous, knowledgeable, and powerful, someone who is in control even when Ralegh disagrees with the choices that she makes. Elizabeth balances power and sexuality, keeping herself a viable match for Ralegh even as she convinces him of her authority as prince. While Ralegh uses sexuality and a romantic connection to appeal to Elizabeth in a poem that does nothing to change his fortunes, Elizabeth writes of her own desire in “On Monsieur’s Departure,” composed during the period of her life when she was engaging with suitors. Using strategies such as the epideictic rhetoric and “despotic” writing seen earlier, Elizabeth crafted herself a feeling female body and a strong princely interior through her poems that navigated the difficult waters of marriage, which would have long-ranging implications for her country and her own ability to keep power over the throne. Whether or not she actually had feelings for the men she nearly entered into marriage with, her poetry walks the line between the desiring woman and the strong prince, drawing the line between the two to create the “androgynous” queen that Glenn defines her as.109 “On Monsieur’s Departure,” a poem most often identified as written after the departure of the French Duke of Anjou,

Francis, Elizabeth’s last serious suitor, toes the line between Elizabeth as a person and a woman with desires versus a queen, prince, and regent:

I grieve and dare not show my discontent; I love yet am forced to seem to hate; I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,

109 Ibid., 163.

62 I seem stark mute, but inwardly do prate, I am, and not; I freeze, and yet am burned, Since from myself another self I turned.

My care is like my shadow in the sun, Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it, Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done, His too-familiar care doth make me rue it. No means I find to rid him from my breast, Til by the end of things it be suppressed.

Some gentler passion slide into my mind, For I am soft and made of melting snow; Or be more cruel, Love, and so be kind, Let me or float, or sink, be high or low, Or let me live with some more sweet content, Or die and so forget what love e’er meant. Eliz. Regina.110

The poem works through the issues between desire and duty, creating a dual Elizabeth who loves but cannot show it. The poem, starting with “grieve” and ending with a desire to “die and so forget what love e’er meant” is a dark excavation of emotions, a sorrowing for something that cannot come to be. A focus on contradictions brings forth the duality of the poem, and nearly literally puts to rest the desire that cannot be shown or come to be. Little is known about the composition or circulation of the poem, and it may have been only found after her death; it certainly wasn’t published until much after Elizabeth lived.111 Because of this, it could perhaps be a private poem, but that does not mean that the sentiments contained within are not for show.

110 Elizabeth I, “On Monsieur’s Departure (Poem 6, Sonetto),” (1580s), reprinted in The Folger Shakespeare Library Presents Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, edited by Steven W. May (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 12.

111 Steven W. May, The Folger Shakespeare Library Presents Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 13.

63 Regardless of when others read it, “On Monsieur’s Departure” deals directly with Elizabeth’s rich inner life and how it is divorced from the persona she projects to the world. Her love and desire on display here, but discussed as though they are hidden away. Elizabeth’s two bodies, the prince and the woman, are made clear—the woman is in love with the unnamed man, but the prince knows she has a role to play. The poem does what other versions of Elizabeth’s rhetoric cannot, as it opens a window into her feelings, or at least pretends to do so. “On Monsieur’s Departure” is focused on her private life, calling attention to the ways that Elizabeth as a person with desires and Elizabeth as prince might have to separate herself. She focuses on emotive responses in the poem, noting her love and the ways that she is or is not allowed to express it. She starts the poem with sharp contrasts, showing the direct opposites that her dual persona forces her into—love “forced” into hate, “prating” internally when perceived as silent, “freezing” while “burned.” The contrasting language shows the opposing ends that the princely persona can take from the internal person, and how far it might drag her desire. Elizabeth entertained suitors for years, but unlike her sister proved rather committed to her maiden Queen status and desire to rule on her own.112 Nevertheless, she considered several options for a consort, including two from France, to solidify an otherwise rocky relationship between the two countries. The second, also the second Duke of

Anjou whom she courted, was much younger than her and also one that nearly came to pass. However, because of Elizabeth’s age at the time of the courtship, the lack of children that would most likely result from the union left questions about how the

112 Carole Levin, The Reign of Elizabeth I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 18-19.

64 country would proceed after Elizabeth’s eventual death.113 Because of these challenges, Elizabeth eventually let the courtship go, but the poem records her conflicted feelings about the choice. While the marriage would of course be political, Elizabeth draws a line between the desires of the person and the actions of the office— showing the clear, contrasting divide between prince and woman. The kairos in the poem takes advantage of the situation, arguing for her abilities as a prince even as she mourns the death of desire for the woman containing the prince. Elizabeth proves her strength in the poem with her refusal to cave or show her emotions to others, even when she claims that she is hurting. Furthermore, the poem records feelings that otherwise would not get voice, and therefore make an argument for her connection to her humanity, even as she acts in the best interest of her country. With a presumption of privacy, “On Monsieur’s Departure” works as an intimate view into Elizabeth’s desires, a way to see her as a person and as a strong leader all in one. In addition, the poem plays with the very idea of acceptable desire— what desire a person in a position of power is allowed to feel. This is exacerbated by her gender, as her desire, because of her gender, is ironically more powerful than male desire. As her father proved, exceptions can be made for male desire. Marriages can be dissolved; religions can be left and formed; children can be declared illegitimate.

When it comes to the female body, though, lines are blurred. While Mary Tudor was able to marry Philip II of Spain and Elizabeth still inherited the throne without too much Spanish oversight, Philip was an ongoing problem for Elizabeth, first as a suitor and later as an aggressor that increased tensions between England and Spain. Adding

113 Ibid.

65 another king to this complicated situation (or re-legitimizing Philip’s claim to the English throne) would cause more problems than they would solve, particularly in an England where a potential heir could be (and often was) a lightening rod for plots against Elizabeth.114 For this reason, Elizabeth’s love life was heavily scrutinized and often sanctioned, for her feelings for her favorites Dudley and Essex to her potential marriage to Anjou.115 Heirs complicated the conversation around Elizabeth, and she was haunted by her father’s own obsession with succession and by her sister’s attempts to have a child that were thwarted by her own body. Elizabeth saw the lack of control had by those who wished to influence succession—her father’s choices, her brother’s early death, her sister’s inability to produce an heir. Mary also showed the issues with giving a man and an outsider access to the throne, and the bodily boundaries to producing heirs. With a body and a womb under scrutiny, Elizabeth could be betrayed by succession in ways that even her father perhaps could not. Kimberly Anne Coles documents the ways that Elizabeth used “counter-heterosexual constructions(s) of chastity,” using bonds of kinship rather than marriage and sexuality to articulate her relationship to the country and court.116 Indeed, Coles argues that Elizabeth’s political work creates her chastity, so she cannot have desire when she creates familial bonds with her country.117 Sidestepping the problem of succession and

114 Ibid.

115 Ibid.

116 Kimberly Anne Coles, “‘Perfect Hole’: Elizabeth I, Spenser, and Chaste Productions,” English Literary Renaissance 32, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 32, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24463708.

117 Ibid., 53.

66 maintaining control herself worked in ways that choosing spouses and heirs had hurt her predecessors and had hurt her during her predecessors’ reigns. Therefore, female desire could bring down the country in ways that male desire could sidestep, and Elizabeth’s body could betray her under constant scrutiny. Her poetry, unlike her female body containing the prince, gives voice to desire that could otherwise be dangerous for her throne, her power, and her country, allowing her the appearance of desire even when chastity, by necessity, must rule her choices.

Elizabeth I’s Play with Gender and Chastity Elizabeth’s poetry, like her speeches, her letters, and her life, show the choices she made as she represented herself to the public. Elizabeth’s use of rhetoric is affected by her humanist education, her difficult childhood and the negotiations that came along with it to keep herself safe, and the constant scrutiny she was under as queen and center of her court. With all these factors, Elizabeth turned to writing as a way to reveal and conceal herself as she navigated being the center of her country. While Elizabeth did not choose to publish her poems directly, her privacy was never guaranteed and therefore her poems always had to have some kind of persuasive power, whether for herself, her court, or the wider country and world. More than this, though, the ways that Elizabeth chose to represent herself becomes a way that we can see feminist and queer choices in rhetoric play out, even today. Elizabeth, while not queer or feminist in her own right, can exist as a figure that helps feminist and queer theorists of today recapture a portion of our history. Valerie Traub argues for understanding queerness through history, using chronology to understand how

67 categories such as current conceptions of sexuality and gender were created.118 Through the analysis of Elizabeth’s poetry, perhaps ideas of codified gender and chastity in early modern writing may not be set in stone. Instead, Elizabeth’s acknowledgement of two genders in her body and her manipulation of desire, chastity, and familial relations as she interacts with her court and country show that bodies and emotions can be managed in ways that, even when they use stereotypes, are far from stereotypical. Elizabeth’s writing provides examples of the persuasive work done by a woman who was able to keep power over a patriarchal society for much longer than anticipated, and therefore her writing can be a guide for those writing today, to pick up on tactics she used personally and apply them to more feminist and queer-aligned goals. Her writing becomes a template to not just survive but thrive in a patriarchal society, to amass personal power and use the female body and desires to create a male persona even stronger than the men around her. Her balance of gender and play with desire shows depth to a world otherwise dominated by binaries, and gives a layered past to conceptions of queerness, gender, and transness that so often gets written off as modern and lacking in history. Elizabeth’s poetry also unites our understanding of kairos and rhetoric with the forgotten mythos, and unites literary analysis with rhetorical creation.

118 Valerie Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 81.

68 Chapter 3

ELIZABETH CARY: FEMALE BODIES AND FAMILIAL NEGOTIATIONS

While the Tragedy of Miriam is known today as the first play published under a woman’s name in English, its author—Elizabeth Cary—is still often left out of conversations about early modern authorship. Though a number of modern editions of her play exist, scholarship of Cary does not come close to rivaling that of Elizabeth I or Margaret Cavendish, and she has not received as much feminist revival as Mary Wroth. This is despite the fact that relatively recent speculation has also led many scholars to believe that The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of King Edward II, King of England, long attributed to her husband Henry Cary and another male author, was written by Elizabeth as well—making it the first history written by a woman and marking another milestone for women’s authorship. Karen Raber outlines the rediscovery of Cary’s work in modern scholarship, providing a much needed chronology to Cary’s literary contributions, starting in the late 1970s when feminist scholars became interested in her work as an early modern woman writer.119 Nancy A. Gutierrez elaborates on the state of early scholarship, claiming that there were two main readings of the play in the criticism of the 1970s and 1980s: one that associates the play with Cary’s personal biography and struggles in her own marriage, and another that examines The Tragedy of Miriam as a genre study that copies Senecan

119 Karen L. Raber, introduction to Elizabeth Cary: Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700, vol. 6, (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), xiv- xv.

69 drama.120 The first reading cannot hold, as the play was most likely written when Cary was a teenager and therefore before she and her husband were living together; thus, obviously, the play could not be a study of marital problems unless Cary served as her own marriage’s Cassandra. The second reading has some merit, as Senecan drama was a popular style amongst writers of closet dramas at the time.121 However, between the two readings, Cary was a recovered as a feminist writer either by inscribing her life and struggles onto her art, or as part of a larger genre-study trajectory with no major contribution of her own. In either case, some of Cary’s agency as a writer is taken from her and instead translated as her biography or the generic conventions she uses. Thus, despite her claims to preeminence, Cary’s first foothold in the modern conversation about early modern authors was reductive, and she has not yet made much of an extended appearance in feminist rhetoric’s survey of early modern writers. To counteract this dearth of study, I take up Cary and argue that Cary’s portrayal of women’s speech and writing in The Tragedy of Miriam opens possibilities for the impact of women’s words—even when the women speaking them are clearly the villains of the story. The Tragedy of Miriam is an extended battle of appearances versus reality, and those that live to the end of the text are able to correctly portray themselves as moral, regardless of their actual morality. As Plato’s Gorgias describes rhetoric as flattery that enhances whatever the rhetor pleases rather than an actual art, the manipulation of language that leads to Miriam’s eventual demise helps explore the

120 Nancy A. Gutierrez, “Valuing Mariam: Genre Study and Feminist Analysis,” in Elizabeth Cary: Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700, vol. 6, ed. Karen Raber. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009): 102-105.

121 Ibid.

70 role of rhetoric as false enhancer.122 The conversations and speeches in The Tragedy of Miriam provide a fruitful ground for the exploration between the ways that bodies create language, and the ways that language can reshape those bodies in ways that also reshape reality. They show the ways that rhetoric can be flattery and be manipulated to make others perceive what the speaker wants, but also that rhetoric often goes deeper to change the world around the women and the play as a whole. In addition to The Tragedy of Miriam, I examine Cary’s near-contemporary biography, The Lady Falkland: Her Life, written “by one of her daughters,” as another example of how language and bodies interact. The author’s language about the way her mother presented herself to her family and the world shows the appearances that Cary put on and the rhetoric that she used to present herself versus the ways that her daughter chose to see and represent her mother. Like in The Tragedy of Miriam, the lines between language and reality blur as rhetoric shapes Cary’s legacy and her children’s memories and representations of their mother. This chapter works to break down Cary’s characters’ manipulations and use of language to express or hide their bodily desires, connecting her and her work to the history of rhetoric through the play’s obsessive focus on writing and speech and through the ways she herself was understood as a woman, mother, and religious person.

Through an exploration of Cary’s characters and the way writing factored into her life, this chapter examines Cary’s embodied rhetoric, and how, through linking their bodies and language, women faced and escaped consequences through their portrayals of their bodies as moral. Cary’s play creates a world where women can

122 Plato, Gorgias, trans. Benjamin Jowett, The Internet Classics Archive, MIT Classics, 2009, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.html.

71 inhabit the role of villain without being condemned, and can fight against their husbands without having to restrain themselves. The women who speak to advance their own ideals are able to use rhetoric and persuasion just as much as the women who speak to be truthful, and can manipulate perceptions in ways that affect reality, for good or ill. As morality and rhetoric are so often linked, this chapter explores these links, how they put women so often at a disadvantage, and the ways that manipulating language can change the way women are perceived. This chapter proposes an examination of the constructions of womanhood written by and written about Cary through a reading of Tragedy of Miriam and of Cary in The Lady Falkland, Her Life. Together, they develop the link between women’s bodies and language, and the gap between perception and reality that can be filled—sometimes beneficially, sometimes dangerously—with rhetoric. My argument in this chapter is twofold: that rhetoric and language have tangible effects on bodies and worlds; and that impressions are more important than materiality, so women can and do use rhetoric to manipulate appearances. In this case, rhetoric is not flattery; it is instead a tactic for women to take care of themselves when appearances are so important. This is seen both in Cary’s fiction and in the written recording of her own life. As I examine the connection between bodies, rhetoric, and manipulation in

Cary’s play and biography, I turn to Susan Jarratt’s Rereading the Sophists: Classical

Rhetoric Refigured to frame these concepts through her reading of the Sophists and their place in modern conceptions of rhetoric. Jarratt’s text makes the connection between the Sophists and modern feminist rhetoric, based on the outcast status of

72 women writers and Sophists as well as the particulars of what each value. 123 These values include the concept of kairos, the suitability of an argument to the moment it is made, and nomos, the social codes of a particular situation, less formal than the logos or laws and logic present. In the Renaissance when Cary was writing, the Sophists were most often perceived through Plato and Aristotle’s reading of them—nearly con artists, who taught anyone willing to pay how to make any idea look better regardless of the morality of doing so. Jarratt’s exploration, and those that came after, complicate the negativity of this perception, and relocate the Sophists to eminence in feminist rhetoric because of the ways that women rhetors could use the concepts the Sophists developed, which focus on perception and immediacy. I use Jarratt’s concept of Sophistic rhetoric and the flexibility it affords speakers in my examination of the rhetoric in The Tragedy of Miriam and The Lady Falkland: Her Life. Through the ways that the women in the texts use kairos and nomos, build reality through perception, and dismantle binary structures through their speech and writing, the women develop their reputations and argue for their choices—often successfully. In addition to the relevancy of Sophistic rhetoric to Miriam and Cary, Jarratt acknowledges the connection between rhetoric and literary works, connecting the Sophists to the Greeks’ traditions of oral poetry.124 She points out the exclusion of mythos, and therefore literature, from the study of rhetoric, an exclusion that did not originally exist.125 Through Jarratt’s own connections to literary forms and the link

123 Susan C. Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 63-79.

124 Ibid., xx.

125 Ibid., xxii.

73 between feminist rhetoric and Sophistic rhetoric, this chapter examines the manipulation of language and the link between bodies, language, and morals in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Miriam and in the way her children depict her life. In The Tragedy of Miriam, the female characters constructed as martyrs and villains and use their voices, bodies, and ideas to create the futures they desire. Miriam speaks freely about her husband and their relationship in the text, only to be condemned to death for a supposed breach in morals—even though she remains loyal and chaste throughout. Salome, Miriam’s husband Herod’s sister, does not remain faithful to her own husband and actively schemes up a murder during the course of the play, but is able to maintain the veneer of propriety through her language—and she is able to put her plans into action. Graphina, a third female character, is the only one of the three who is able to escape censure by the chorus and safely and happily survive the play. Miranda Garno Nesler argues that Graphina escapes censure like Cary by demonstrating mastery of rhetoric more silently through writing, linking Mariam and Salome with “acting and vocality.”126 Nesler sees Graphina as the ultimate “winner” in the text, the woman who manages language successfully by limiting herself to written language. While it is true that Graphina escapes any kind of negative perception, she’s not the only “winner” here: Salome succeeds in her endeavors, winning herself freedom from her husband and a clear path to a new one. It is only Miriam, who looks unvirtuous but maintains her morality, who ends up condemned and killed by the end of the play. While maintaining and communicating virtue works for Graphina, and

126 Miranda Garno Nesler, “Closeted Authority in The Tragedy of Mariam,” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 52, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 365, 370, doi:10.1353/sel.2012.0013.

74 communicating virtue but living vice also leads to success for Salome’s scheming, failing to communicate virtue while maintaining it is not a viable option for women. Bodily virtue and rhetoric can be manipulated in the world of The Tragedy of Miriam, and the way they are or are not controlled provides options for the ways we can interpret and use the tactics in the play today. The Lady Falkland: Her Life uses similar methods to Cary’s own—writing and publishing—to explore the same ideas that Cary herself examines, namely the appearance versus the reality of morality in women’s lives. This text is meant to be an honest retelling of Cary’s life, using language to portray her as a protector of her children’s souls. Written about her after her death, it is a nearly contemporary account of Cary’s life, focusing on her Catholicism and how her conversion and estrangement affected her familial relationships. For Cary’s daughter, there is a struggle in the text between the little devotion Cary has to or even presence in her children’s lives, especially when they were young, versus the benefit of getting most of them to convert to Catholicism later in life, protecting their immortal souls. While the text forgives Cary for her early neglect, it does not flinch away from descriptions of her devotion to her religion over her children, or for the heightened affections the children had for their father rather than their mother. Through an exploration of Cary’s Catholicism and her quest to have her children convert, her dedication to her children’s education, and the tension between Cary’s religion and her mostly neglected motherly duties, The Lady Falkland: Her Life showcases the rhetoric necessary for Cary to negotiate her life and uses similar strategies to Cary to understand how she made her choices, ones that affected her children deeply. Cary creates a world in The Tragedy of Miriam that explores the embodied rhetoric of morality, and the need to communicate versus live

75 this morality. In The Lady Falkland: Her Life, her own morality and life choices are explored, connected to the concepts of morality through her mothering and her religiosity. This chapter examines both texts to better understand the interaction between morality and rhetoric in Cary’s life and works. In the next section, I connect The Lady Falkland: Her Life to Sophistic rhetoric, demonstrating the ways that Cary’s religious goals and successes are at odds with her maternal connection to her children and her presence in their lives. I work through the major moments in the biography and the focus on Cary’s early life, her destitution in the face of her conversion, and her devotion to the conversion of her children, to better understand both how Cary used rhetoric to engage with the major players of her life and how rhetoric is manipulated to make Cary understandable and palatable to her audience. Next, I break down a close reading of The Tragedy of Miriam, examining the ways that language is crucial for perception of women and for the attainment of their goals. Through Jarratt’s definitions of Sophistic and feminist rhetoric and concepts of embodied rhetoric, I connect these two texts to the ways that language is changed, manipulated, and used to define women’s lives and goals, even when they do not conform to others’ perceptions of the best choices for women.

Cary as Mother and Catholic in Text: The Lady Falkland, Her Life The Tragedy of Miriam explores the ways women’s use of, and sometimes manipulation of, language is seen as a true representation of a woman herself, even if it conceals more than it reveals. Representations of women in print hit close to home with Cary, as a nearly contemporaneous biography of her was written by her children. Written by either or both of her daughters Lucy and Anne Cary while they were nuns in the same Cambrai convent in northern France, their religion and hers deeply

76 influences the form of the text.127 Mary Beth Long points out the similarities between the Life and the saint’s life genre popular for Catholics in the medieval period, particularly similarities to the texts about virgin martyrs.128 Because the text closely mirrors those documenting the lives of saints and martyrs, the biography explores the relationship between Cary and her Catholicism, the challenges it posed in her life, and the ways it interfered with and eventually gave her back her family. The Lady Falkland, Her Life, like Cary’s own Tragedy of Miriam, blurs the line between women and the way they communicate, depicting the “true” Cary as the Catholic who worked tirelessly to convert her children as well as the mother who struggled to support her children through the challenges her conversion presented to her. In this section, I examine the Catholic myth-making at play in this text, examining the intersections between religion, education, and motherhood presented in the figure of Cary, and the way that the rhetoric of the text and in the text helps to present and conceal Cary as a Catholic and a mother. I examine the ways that the language here, chosen by her children, is used to understand Cary herself—both by her children as they wrote it, and later by those who read it long after her time. The Lady Falkland, Her Life illuminates the overall trajectory of Cary’s life as a Catholic in a predominately Protestant society, but also works to contextualize Cary as a mother whose relationship to her children was often stilted, often because of her

127 Mary Beth Long, “The Life as Vita: Reading The Lady Falkland Her Life as Hagiography,” English Literary Renaissance 38, no. 2, (2008): 304, https://doi- org.udel.idm.oclc.org/10.1111/j.1475-6757.2008.00125.x.

128 Ibid., 308. Long also includes a chart breaking down the similarities between the Life and general virgin martyr narratives, on page 309.

77 conversion. Cary, unlike the rest of the women included in this dissertation, had a very recognizable relationship to wife- and motherhood. Where Elizabeth I was unmarried and childless, Cavendish was married but childless, and Mary Wroth was widowed young and her living children were produced out of wedlock, Cary’s experience of betrothal, marriage, children, and widowhood follow a more normative pattern recognizable in early modern women. Historian Barbara J. Harris claims that 91% of aristocratic women bore children, and Cary herself had eleven, joining the 30% of women who had more than six children.129 Overall she had an experience of marriage that fits Harris’s outline as well—married young, living apart from her husband until their situations were compatible, moving in with his family, bearing multiple children, and then young widowhood.130 While some of her life pattern matches the general outlines we now map for early modern women, Cary’s religious conversion disrupted her life in ways that Harris’s outlines cannot precisely account for. Elizabeth Ann Mackay helps to fill the gaps between Cary’s life as a wife and mother and her conversion, exploring The Lady Falkland, Her Life not just for its religious benefits, or the way it provides information about Cary’s life, but for the tension seen in the text between Cary’s mothering and her focus on her children’s conversions to Catholicism.131 Mackay argues that much of the tension seen in the text between a

129 Barbara J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 1450-1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 99.

130 Ibid., 62-75.

131 Elizabeth Ann Mackay, “Shrew(d) Maternities, Elizabeth Cary’s Life, and Filial Equivocations,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 33, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 23-50, https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/564228.

78 Catholic daughter’s account of her mother’s life and religious convictions and the lack of a presence Cary has in her children’s lives comes from the rhetorical choices Cary makes as a wife and mother, and therefore the lessons she passes down to her daughters as they navigate the world.132 Mackay uses George Puttenham’s definitions of rhetorical devices to discuss Cary’s choices, and the way they affect the choices her daughter made in writing her biography.133 In this section, I expand on Mackay’s discussion of rhetorical tactics in Cary’s Life and the tension between religion and maternity seen in the text by introducing the sophistic concepts of kairos and nomos as defined by Susan Jarratt.134 Cary’s Life demonstrates the ways that a woman’s duties—as wife, as mother, as religious person—are constructed through language, and the complicated relationship between depiction and reality. The connection between Sophists and feminism is located in “the devaluation of both the sophists and women operates as their reduction to a ‘style’ devoid of substance.”135 While the connection between style and femininity is certainly developed in the early discussions of Cary’s life—Mackay points out Cary’s connection to the motto “Bee and Seeme”—Life often denies Cary the benefit of style, exposing the woman behind the text who is not all that she seems to be.136 Cary’s

132 Ibid., 32.

133 Ibid., 31.

134 Susan C. Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991).

135 Ibid., 65.

136 Elizabeth Ann Mackay, “Shrew(d) Maternities, Elizabeth Cary’s Life, and Filial Equivocations,” Tulsa Study in Women’s Literature 33, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 34, https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/564228.

79 rhetoric relies on exposing the women behind the style, and as such she shows the work of women and of sophists to be manipulative, even as she advocates for this rhetoric. Even in her return to their lives, Cary is not the loving parent that her husband is remembered as; instead, she is a religious presence, working to educate and convert her children, and to remove her younger children from her oldest son’s wardship. Even as Cary made connections with her children, the focus is never on their relationships and always on their religion and education. Cary comes across as emotionally distant from her children, with poor mental health and emotional control but a single-minded focus on the religious conversion and immortal souls of her children. The tension between Cary’s religious duties and her maternal duties are on full display in The Lady Falkland: Her Life, and her life can be read through the concept of nomos: a flexible social code in contrast to the fixed laws of logos.137 The way the author chooses to portray her mother shifts throughout the text—from a young woman analogous to a virgin martyr, to a converted Catholic devoted in her beliefs, to a woman unable to care for her children, and finally to a woman obsessed with properly educating and converting her children. The ways Cary is measured shifts with the codes being used in the text: whether she should be measured as mother, as Catholic, or as martyr. The Life starts with a valuation of Cary as a brilliant child, mirroring the saint’s life motif with a focus on her morality and intelligence early in life. The author brings up Cary’s engagement with languages, which she learned “of herself, without a teacher… she learnt French, Spanish, Italian, which she always understood very

137 Susan C. Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 74.

80 perfectly. She learnt Latin in the same manner (without being taught) and understood it perfectly when she was young, and translated the Epistles of Seneca out of it into English.”138 The author focuses on her grasp of languages and what that means for her religious understandings, setting Cary up as a smart woman with religious leanings and a propensity for words. She learns languages “of herself,” capable without instruction, and uses her knowledge and ability to translate works with strong rhetorical and moral instruction. Compared to the early lives of Catholic saints, Cary is strong in her faith and her education; in this sense, she fits the pattern created by the genre and excels in the rhetorical demands the genre places on her. Cary exemplifies the kairos necessary of a young woman testing her educational and religious limits, and she clearly exemplifies the social demands placed on her by the genre chosen by her daughter. It is when Cary’s children enter the equation that this image of Cary is shaken, as the nomos and patterns that her daughter fits her into shift because of the demands on early modern mothers that Cary cannot attain. The rhetorical patterns of rhetoric and social codes that Cary’s daughter compares her to change once Cary becomes a mother, as virgin martyrs do not have children they must educate and provide for, and, moreover, her daughter was very affected by Cary’s performance as a mother and educator directly. When discussing her mother’s approach to her children, Cary’s daughter seems to condemn her for a lack of proper kairos, not rising to the occasion, and not living up to the nomos that her children ask of her. This starts with a frank

138 The Lady Falkland Her Life by One of Her Daughters, in The Tragedy of Mariam The Fair Queen of Jewry, edited by Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 186.

81 examination of Cary’s mental state: “in this time she had some occasions of trouble, which afflicted her so much as twice to put her into so deep melancholy (while she was with child of her 2d and 4th child) that she lost the perfect use of her reason, and was in much danger of her life.”139 Cary’s ability to function as a mother falters as her health lapses with her children’s births, and her ability to retain languages, translate important texts, and make educational choices for herself and her children are threatened by the challenges of her mental health. Despite such a personal struggle, the author makes it clear what these struggles and choices cost her children: she “taught 3 or 4 of the eldest. After, having other occasions to divert her, she left that to others.”140 It is “other occasions” that stop her from performing as a mother, and by the new guidelines set by her motherhood, Cary falters as a woman and educator. Cary’s life as a Catholic is the focus of the text, often used in ways that excuse Cary’s development as a wife and mother because of her devotion to religion. In this sense, Cary does live up to the nomos that her daughter imposes on her life in writing, because she succeeds as a Catholic and in converting her children after her. After her death, her children use her religion as a way of defining Cary through language—of excusing the ways that she does not perform womanhood with the ways that she conforms to Catholic standards. The gap between Cary as brilliant youth and the eventual architect of her children’s conversions and Cary as distant, frazzled and often depressed mother is created through the author’s apparent goal to present the fullness of Cary as a mother and woman—to measure her across the several social standards

139 Ibid., 195.

140 Ibid., 192.

82 that Cary is held to throughout her life. Cary’s choices were structured by her circumstances, her mental state, poverty, and poor connections, but her daughter is unflinching of her portrayal of these circumstances as caused at least in part by Cary’s conversion to Catholicism. Her lapses into depression, matched with her troubled relationship with her mother-in-law, her grief at the death of her eldest daughter in childbirth, and her poverty, “which was in such extremity, as she had not meat of any sort to put in her mouth, which being a thing then wholly strange to her, she having hitherto been very far from all personal want,” create a position for Cary that keeps her from her children.141 Cary’s conversion, in a Protestant England where religion was structured through the king, could be construed as treasonous.142 This impression of Cary as a scattered mother is exacerbated when she chooses to separate “herself from them [her children] (for it was certain, that as he would not permit them to live with her, no more would he ever suffer her to live with him).”143 This lasts until her husbands’ death, when her children come to live with her because they think “it his will,” rather than any desire to live with her directly.144 The author portrays all of Cary’s choices, those that are affected by her conversion, and those that make her look like an unstable and unfit mother. The nomos of the text creates patterns of

141 Ibid., 199, 202, 207.

142 Elizabeth Ann Mackay, “Shrew(d) Maternities, Elizabeth Cary’s Life, and Filial Equivocations,” Tulsa Study in Women’s Literature 33, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 35, https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/564228.

143 The Lady Falkland Her Life by One of Her Daughters, in The Tragedy of Mariam The Fair Queen of Jewry, edited by Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 209.

144 Ibid., 222.

83 understanding of Cary’s life, motherhood, and educational potential—for herself and for her children, in rhetoric and in Catholicism—and Cary is measured through her daughter’s choice of language. The steady focus on her failures exposes the social norms that Cary cannot measure up to, and exposes the complex relationship between motherhood, education, and religion developed in the text. Cary often fails to find the proper kairos in the moments presented to her—she is not able to be the mother and educator her children need. The author uses the language of her biography to expose these failures of motherhood and rhetoric and the gaps in Cary’s life and choices. Her conversion to Catholicism and the gaps it leaves in her life is a focus of the early parts of the text, but the latter half devotes itself to the education of her children and their conversions to the faith. This starts with an almost obsessive focus on conversations with Mr. Chillingworth, a duplicitous Catholic who leaves her daughters questioning their faith. Though Cary originally trusted him and allowed him to educate her children, she is eventually persuaded to keep him away from them.145 Through eventually discovering the threat he poses for her family, Cary is able to protect her children’s conversions and their immortal souls. Finally, the rescue of Cary’s youngest sons from her eldest’s wardship allows her to protect them and their immortal soul by smuggling him to France and the safe embrace of Catholic tutors.146 This rescue, the last major event of the text, seems to serve as a final redemptive arc for Cary’s mothering and the potential failures she had made up to this point, and the choices Cary makes for her children and her religion work to create a new nomos that Cary is

145 Ibid., 241.

146 Ibid., 262.

84 measured by in the text—and one that she eventually lives up to. Cary’s relationships with her eldest children are the most complicated, as they were raised largely outside of her influence. As their move to France kept the children from any kind of interference, this move, more than anything else, works as a way of reassuring the reader of Cary’s commitment to converting her children, and therefore her commitment to her children in general. While Cary was clearly not a supportive mother before all of this, her dedication to her children’s souls goes far to convince the writers—and be a convincing moment in the text—that Cary is in fact a good mother who cares about her children, but perhaps not in an immediate sense. The overarching care that wardship and conversion means for her children becomes the ruler by which Cary is measured throughout the text, and with this last rescue, she finally gets it right. The Tragedy of Miriam is never mentioned in the biography, and clearly ancillary to a story about her conversion and the conversion of her children. Because her writing is pushed to the side of her religiosity, it seems as though this depiction of her life is not important to her works, or that her works did not influence this vision of her life. However, the themes present in the biography—of education, of presentation versus reality—also play a strong role in the ways that Cary’s children present her life. Cary’s life, as her characters, also walks the line between who she is truly and how she is represented. Cary’s daughter works hard to show that Cary toes the line between a very smart and capable woman, both in the text and in life, and the ways that she navigated her relationship with her children, which was often tinged by depression, neglect, legal issues, and religious differences. While her actions to have them converted and her commitment to their educations does much to erase the early neglect in the biography, it still presents her as a woman who committed the neglect in

85 the first place. Though it is more difficult to compare the way Cary is presented versus her true self in the biography, we do see the difference between how Cary lived and what Cary did, and how these choices affected her children. In addition, we see the ways that Cary’s Catholicism, and her children’s subsequent conversions, affect the ways that they see and present their mother. Cary is a sum of many parts, and her Catholicism colors the reasons why this biography was created and how she is perceived as a woman and a mother.

Embodied Rhetoric and Domestic Conversation in The Tragedy of Mariam Elizabeth Cary’s closet drama The Tragedy of Miriam is another close study of a single woman’s life, rewriting the life and death of the Biblical Miriam, wife of Herod, and focusing on how Miriam’s powers of communication are at odds with her ability to keep her marriage stable. Miriam’s desire to speak out condemns her home life with Herod because he cannot trust her to contain her use of her body if she cannot contain use of her voice. At the end of The Tragedy of Miriam, the chorus describes the events that happened over the course of the play:

Tonight our Herod doth alive remain; The guiltless Mariam is deprived of breath; … Herod this morning did expect with joy To see his Mariam’s much beloved face, And yet ere night he did her life destroy And surely thought she did her name disgrace. Yet now again so short do humours last, He both repents her death and knows her chaste. (5.Chorus 13-24)147

147 Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry, ed. Ramona Wray (New York: Arden Early Modern Drama, 2012), 205.

86 When describing Mariam’s death, the Chorus describes her as “deprived of breath,” her body obviously deceased but also, specifically, denied the ability to produce speech any longer. This connection between speech and physicality is embodied rhetoric—that is, where the act of speaking is inextricably linked to the body that produces said speech. This simple turn of phrase connects Mariam with her ability to produce speech, which we learn was the reason for her death: “And yet ere night he did her life destroy/ And surely thought she did her name disgrace.” The reflexive construction of Mariam’s relation to her disgrace places the blame squarely, twice, on Mariam and the ways in which she conducted herself. Though Herod “did her life destroy,” it was Mariam who disgraced her own name. Once her name is disconnected from her body, when her body is literally deprived of life and her reputation is the only part of her left, her innocence is once again proclaimed. The chorus claims that Mariam’s body is dangerous. It is only from discarding the body and separating body from speech and reputation that her reputation is saved. The ways in which Mariam (and Salome, her sister-in-law) speak demonstrate that female speech and female sexuality are referenced and understood in the text as one and the same. Mariam and Salome’s bodies and words are connected intimately throughout the play, and the way they use their words ultimately determines their bodily fates. In order to understand the ways in which this play dramatizes women’s speech, I use the rhetoric of the body that Jay Dolmage describes in his book, Disability Rhetoric. Dolmage locates the body within rhetorical framework by defining rhetoric as “embodied,” meaning that he “establish[es] the body itself as the

87 origin and epistemological home of all meaning-making.”148 Dolmage returns the idea of speech, writing, language, and “meaning-making” to the framework of the body, advocating for an understanding of these works as bonded with the bodies that produce them. In this vein, I will read Mariam and Salome as speaking from female bodies, and specifically from sexualized female bodies. Their speech is inextricable from the ways in which they are seen and defined as women who are known throughout the play for their real and imagined sexual desires. I read The Tragedy of Mariam through a lens of embodied rhetoric and with the concept of kairos in order to open up a space for the sexualized female body in historical and literary understandings of women’s rhetoric. By positioning these characters as sexualized female bodies, Cary enters her text into a larger conversation about the ways in which women can enter into public discourse. Cary’s use of the closet drama genre and act of publishing her work demonstrates her own deliberate manipulation of her position in society to communicate her ideas, and she uses her drama to teach women how to continue to do so. The Tragedy of Mariam opens space to understand the ways in which characters’ embodied speech, connected so intimately with their female bodies, teach the women of the early modern period to manipulate their voices and take advantage of kairos so they can be heard in the public arena.

The chorus acts as the overt voice of tradition throughout Cary’s Tragedy of

Mariam, and it explicitly condemns women who act in such a way that they expose the indecency of the female body through speech and thought. The chorus establishes the parallelism that exists between sex and speech throughout the text and for all the

148 Jay Timothy Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 19.

88 women in the play. These voices react negatively to Mariam’s unwillingness to appease Herod upon his return home, chiding her for not placating her husband with her words and her body. They call out the women of the play for not giving themselves to their husbands completely:

When to their husbands they themselves do bind, Do they not wholly give themselves away? Or give they but their body, not their mind, Reserving that, though best, for others’ prey? (3.Chorus 19-22)149

The contrast set up here represents the entire female existence promised to the husband. The chorus creates a dichotomy between mind and body, speech and physicality, that at first seems to contradict the concept of embodied rhetoric that would claim that thoughts stem from the bodies that produce them rather than making a distinction between the two. However, by creating such a divide, they call attention to the fact that it should not exist in the first place. By the logic of the play, women should belong, body and mind, to their husbands, and a deviant thought is just as bad as deviant action. Nesler claims the chorus represents the “conduct literature cohort” as a whole, and the distinction between body and mind is seen in Juan Luis Vives’s conduct manual, The Education of a Christian Woman, as well.150 Vives claims that, “a woman who loves a man who is not her husband is a prostitute in her body if she

149 Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry, ed. Ramona Wray (New York: Arden Early Modern Drama, 2012), 149.

150 Miranda Garno Nesler, “Closeted Authority in The Tragedy of Mariam,” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 52, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 365, doi:10.1353/sel.2012.0013.

89 has carnal relations with him, and in her mind if she does not.”151 Vives’s adage is a stronger injunction against women than the chorus’, but the message is, at its root, the same: women must be wholly devoted to their husbands, and any who have deviated in thought or deed have committed a grave sin. Though once again, there is a disconnect between thought and body, it is merely to emphasize the different ways in which one can sin, not to claim that one is necessarily worse than the other. Women cannot deviate from the bond they have to their husbands, and body and mind should be aligned in this devotion. Though it is unsurprising in the course of the play as her character is revealed, Salome does not meet the qualifications of chastity outlined by the chorus and Vives and is deemed unfaithful. However, the chorus is actually reprimanding Mariam in the prior speech. Salome’s marriage to Constabarus is her second marriage; her first husband was killed for the same transgression that Sohemus commits in the trajectory of the play, failing to kill Mariam when Herod is rumored dead. Salome was previously in love with Constabarus and used her first husband’s failure to obey Herod’s command to marry Constabarus. Now she is in love with Silleus, the Prince of Arabia, and would like to get rid of Constabarus as well. Salome clearly “sins in her mind,” but she ends the play with Constabarus and Mariam both dead by her direction, so her path is clear to Silleus. The chorus condemns Miriam, for they claim that she

“usurps upon another’s right/ That seeks to be by public language graced;/… Her

151 Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 170.

90 mind, if not peculiar, is not chaste” (3.Chorus 25-28).152 Her public speaking, her desires to be heard and understood by all rather than by just her husband, put her on the same level as Salome. Both women are condemned in the text, but only one is killed for her behaviors, while the other seems to receive all she desires. From Mariam and Salome, women reading the play learn that there are multiple ways to sin against a husband, and an unhappy marriage most often leads to a woman shamed rather than a man. However, Salome knows to disguise her feelings, while Mariam’s public speaking connects her body explicitly to those around her. Salome engages with the appropriate kairos, capitalizing on the nomos that connect women’s bodies and speech. Thus, Salome’s words protect her actions, while Miriam’s words, and her desire to speak freely to the men around her and ignore social conventions, condemn her to death. Though Mariam does not “reserve” her mind or her speech for another man, she is associated throughout the text with speaking in a way that is routinely denounced. It is Mariam, not Salome, whose mind and body are disgraced because she speaks in public to one that is not her husband. Therefore, it is Mariam, not Salome, who is condemned as a “prostitute in her mind” for her lack of discretion in public. Mariam’s public and frequent public speeches, often referencing her husband, demonstrate a lack of faithfulness toward her husband because her freedom with her speech parallels a suspected freedom with her body. As we turn to Mariam’s own words, we find her speech marked by sudden exclamations that come from her heart, without much consideration for how these words may be perceived. Her very first line in the play, which is the very first line of the play, shows her awareness of her

152 Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry, ed. Ramona Wray (New York: Arden Early Modern Drama, 2012), 149.

91 tendency to free speech: “How oft have I with public voice run on… Excuse too rash a judgment in a woman” (1.1.1-6).153 The opening scene, then, is asking for forgiveness for Mariam’s “womanly” rationale, but the act of running on with a “public voice” is not considered a womanly attribute. The voices of women bring to mind their sexualized bodies, as we saw earlier in Vives’s link between the intimate sex-act and a woman’s place in public. In order to preserve a woman’s modesty, Vives advocates for women to “hear few things, especially when men are speaking, and say even less.”154 He goes even further to advise that “she will not speak, save when it would be harmful to keep silent; she will not listen or give heed to things that do not pertain to upright morals.”155 In order to preserve her modesty as a married woman, and in order for men to not think of what she and her husband may or may not do together in private, women should be strictly confined in her speech and even her listening habits. Miriam acknowledges that she does not use kairos correctly, speaking out of turn and violating the social rules in place around her. Her speech is seen as a threat rather than a benefit. For Vives, then, Mariam is calling attention to the acts of the marriage bed. Her public speech is embodied; it immediately calls attention to the sexual female body that Mariam possesses and thus attracts the attention of men who are not her husband to her sexual potential. Men who hear her unrestrained voice, then, are immediately given the privilege of experiencing one part of the woman that should be

153 Ibid., 83.

154 Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, Ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 245.

155 Ibid., 245.

92 restricted to her husband. Mariam’s story seems to parallel the advice that Vives gives: her inability to control her speech leads directly to her downfall. We come to see that Mariam’s public speech allows men other than her husband to experience the pleasures of Mariam, body and mind. On this level of the play, it seems as though Cary commands women to stay silent rather than to overstep their bounds. Though Mariam is aware of her too-rash speech and apologizes for it, it is precisely these exclamations that condemn her to death. Her knowledge of her poor choices confirms that Mariam’s mind, and therefore her body, must be sinning against her husband. Mariam choice to speak publicly backfires when she has an intimate conversation with Herod’s councilor, Sohemus, a man outside of her immediate family. Herod had gone to Rome and it was rumored that Caesar had killed him. While he was gone, Sohemus told Mariam of the risk to her life and does not kill her, going back on Herod’s explicit instructions. Herod comes home unexpectedly, and suspicion is raised about the relationship between Mariam and Sohemus because of this betrayal of Herod’s trust. She is upset to find out that Herod is alive and coming home, and he encourages her to be more “temperate” in her behaviors so that she can once again win over Herod’s heart, which he sees as looking out for her best interests in light of Herod’s return.156 Mariam, true to her form of speaking her mind, openly scorns this suggestion: “And must I to my prison turn again?” completely rejecting any kind of amelioration for her marriage.157 The problem with this claim in the context of the play is not just that she is speaking against her husband, but that she is speaking

156 Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry, ed. Ramona Wray (New York: Arden Early Modern Drama, 2012), 144 (3.3.31-32).

157 Ibid., 3.3.33.

93 against her husband to an unrelated third party, and a man. Mariam directly violates the nomos of the play, going against social norms and condemning her body through her speech. Vives’s injunction against female speech in public speaks directly against this action, and it is the suspicion of a relationship between Sohemus and Mariam that condemns her to death. When Herod finds out that Sohemus betrayed him by telling Mariam about his injunction against her life, he quickly jumps to the conclusion that they are in love and claims that she wishes “To add a murder to your breach of vow” (4.4.26).158 Mariam is suspected when a butler brings a glass of love potion, proven to be poison, to Herod. He assumes that, for both of them to go against his wishes, they must have spoken together in private, and therefore Mariam’s guilt is proven because Miriam has spoken privately with another man, despite strict social law that she should not. Their verbal intimacy implies an intimacy of the body that Mariam does not have enough proof to deny. She has betrayed her marriage vows to speak with Sohemus, and Herod sees her die for this. Mariam’s plot line convinces the reader that following Vives’s advice is the only way to stay pure, for Mariam’s speech, though not inherently sexual, still marks her a deviant and condemns her to death. Mariam’s transgression against her husband is that she does not understand the social conventions that her speech communicates more than just her thoughts, but reflects on her body as well. She is unable to comprehend that her body is implicated when her mind sins, and throughout the play, readers are made aware of Mariam’s mistake. Other characters are quick to point out her indiscretion, including Sohemus, though it is their conversation that eventually condemns them both. He declares,

158 Ibid., 160.

94 “Unbridled speech is Mariam’s worst disgrace/ And will endanger her without desert” (3.3.65-66).159 Sohemus overtly tells the audience that Mariam’s “disgrace” is her lack of the ability to “temper” her speech.160 Sohemus knows that if Mariam does not prove herself chaste with her words, she can be condemned for crimes against her husband. Vives makes a similar chastisement for early modern women:

The discreet woman with utmost vigilance and instinctive sagacity will ferret out whether her husband harbors any suspicions against her or any seeds of anger or hatred, some remnant of distrust. If such exist, she will devote her energies to dispel them before they take root. These increase for the slightest reason and become fatal.161 Vives instructs women to make sure that men think fondly on them always, or else it can backfire upon the woman. Sohemus knows that Mariam is not working to cater to Herod despite his advice, and is aware that her speech against Herod in person as well as to him will “become fatal.” The chorus echoes these views, claiming that:

’Tis not enough for one that is a wife To keep her spotless from an act of ill, But from suspicion she should free her life And bare herself of power as well as will. (3.Chorus 1-4)162 By discussing her husband with another rather than working to make him love her, Mariam’s own speech-acts seal her fate. She speaks against Herod to another man and

159 Ibid., 146.

160 Ibid., 3.3.64.

161 Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, Ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 225.

162 Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry, ed. Ramona Wray (New York: Arden Early Modern Drama, 2012), 148.

95 to his face, and so her words make men suspicious of her actions, though they know she works to stay chaste. Karen Raber uses an anecdote from Elizabeth Cary’s own life to demonstrate Mariam’s fault: “The advice Cary eventually had inscribed on her daughter’s wedding ring, to ‘Be and Seem,’ encompasses the problem of marriage for a woman of Cary’s background. The need to equate appearance and reality speaks eloquently about the clear gulf between the two.”163 Mariam fails to realize that it is the “Seem” that she needs to preserve, more so than the “Be.” Mariam knows she is pure, but she fails to take into account the fact that her words speak for her body, and implicate her in acts of the body. Cary warns her readers, both overtly and by aligning her words with Vives’s text, that Mariam’s lack of accountability for her words is her main fault. Mariam cannot modulate her speech in public or recognize what her speech implies about her body, and for this she stands as a figure for how Renaissance women should not conduct themselves, despite her praised beauty and chastity. Katherine R. Larson, in her chapter on “‘Intercourses of Friendship’: Gender, Conversation, and Social Performance,” discusses the ways in which women’s conversation was inherently sexualized. She claims that, “the gendering of conversation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England has its roots in the classical emphasis on the sexualized relationship between a woman’s words and her body as well as in conversation’s implicit association with both verbal and physical intimacy.”164

163 Karen L. Raber, “Gender and the Political Subject in The Tragedy of Mariam,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 35, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 324, http://www.jstor.org/stable/451028.

164 Larson, Katherine R. Early Modern Women in Conversation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 29-30.

96 Mariam demonstrates what happens when a woman is not aware of this intimate link of female sexuality and female speech: it creates an intimacy between herself and those she speaks to, even when such an intimacy should not exist. Salome, however, does not disclose her full motivations and instead works to play on others’ motivations, even when she has public conversations. Salome manipulates the nomos that guide women’s speech, avoiding the physical intimacy link that Mariam and Sohemus’s relationship ultimately makes and thus avoiding censure. Larson demonstrates the contrast between Salome’s ability to manipulate those around her to Mariam’s difficulty in communication, and I quote at length:

The physical and verbal moderation demanded of women in the period certainly necessitated careful negotiation of the sexualized nuances of conversational interaction. Mariam’s failure to carve out a tenable speaking position for herself in Cary’s tragedy, which taps into the shaming and silencing mechanisms in early modern culture that worked to place bounds on women’s self-expression, underscores the difficulties inherent in this task.165 Mariam is unable to modulate her speaking through the sexualized lens it is often perceived through, but Salome is able to negotiate her space in a conversation precisely because she has learned to hide her true desires from any one person. Most of the information we as an audience get about Salome’s motivations come through private monologue, so her virtue is preserved in the public space of the play. Though she is known to be unchaste by her multiple husbands and by those in her immediate circle, her body and speech both reflect the actions of someone able to moderate her choices. Therefore, she is allowed to covertly continue to use her body and her mind any way she likes, manipulating kairos and nomos so that she can achieve her goals

165 Ibid., 34.

97 within the rhetorical boundaries placed on women’s speech. While Larson focuses on Mariam’s failures, the importance here is Salome’s success. Though she is far from a model woman, she is able to thrive in society because she moderates her interactions properly, and her body and speech both mirror proper ladylike actions. In Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, Salome shows awareness for her embodied speech and uses her body as a metaphor for communicating her plans. In particular, Salome often mentions her tongue in the context of the drama, which functions as a constant bodily reminder of her manipulations. More than this, however, the focus on her tongue also recognizes her sexual transgressions:

But now, ill-fated Salome, thy tongue To Constabarus by itself is tied; And now, except I do the Hebrew wrong, I cannot be the fair Arabian bride. (1.4.17-20)166

Salome refers here to her wedding vows, which legally bind her to her second husband Constabarus unless he dies, because women cannot divorce men though men can divorce women. The phrasing suggests a more physical connection, however, between Salome and Constabarus. Salome’s tongue is the specific body part by which she is joined to her husband through speech, a reminder of their physical relationship as well as the spiritual connection to which it refers. This physical reminder calls attention to the fact that Salome and her husband have more than just a spoken connection; they also have a connection that was consummated between their bodies. The use of “tongue” as metaphor drives the connection between physical, sexual body and ephemeral speech; though the vow has long been spoken and is no longer present, the

166 Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry, ed. Ramona Wray (New York: Arden Early Modern Drama, 2012), 98.

98 consummation of said vow lingers between them as a physical commitment that is not so easily discarded. By naming a specific body part, Salome is calling attention to the physical act of speech as well as the physical act of marriage, the two intersecting acts that tie her permanently to Constabarus. Heather E. Ostman connects the tongue, specifically, to acts of slander and fears about disseminating speech, pointing out the physical representation of these acts. She mentions the “ambivalence” felt toward the tongue in the early modern period particularly because it can move independently and can “resist confinement” in the mouth.167 Salome’s allusion to her tongue demonstrates that Salome herself wishes to resist the confinement of her marriage and to reverse the actions she set in motion with her body and words. Ostman also connects the concept of slander to Erasmus’s discussion of the tongue in “On the Use and Abuse of the Tongue,” published in 1525, which links the transgressions of the tongue with a “harlot,” making explicit the bond between free speech and free sexuality.168 Salome’s reference creates a link to the idea of loose women and unbridled speech that could be dangerous if left unchecked. Salome’s tongue is the orchestrator of fates throughout Mariam and defines her body as dangerous, independent, and unable to be controlled. However, this connection is made in monologue, so Salome’s female tongue goes unrecognized as dangerous to the public in the play. While the Chorus condemns her,

167 Heather E. Ostman, “Backbiters, Flatterers, and Monarchs: Domestic Politics in The Tragedy of Mariam,” in Elizabeth Cary: Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700, Vol. 6, ed. Karen Raber (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 305.

168 Ibid., 306.

99 they are unable to control her tongue or her actions as she moves through the play. Cary forces women to recognize the power of their speech-acts, but as long as they are aware of this power, they can control it rather than succumb to it. Mariam’s frank speech creates the illusion of an unchaste body. Salome is able to use her body and her speech in ways that ultimately allow her to get away with her actions despite the fact that she also defies Vives and is a “prostitute in her mind.” Salome works to manipulate the words and actions of others in order to keep herself from being implicated by her speech. Instead of getting her own voice tangled up in something that may make her appear as though she is overreaching herself as a noblewoman, she gets her brother Pheroras to condemn her husband in a way that will cater to Herod’s ideals, manipulating the nomos that allows men to speak and accuse others in public in a way that is denied women. Pheroras has married Graphina, a lower-class woman that he loves, instead of Herod’s young daughter, whom Herod wanted Pheroras to marry in order to keep the throne in the family. In order to keep himself out of trouble, he is willing to sell out Constabarus for harboring two men whom Herod has deemed traitors. Salome is able to use her knowledge of her husband’s transgression against Herod to complete her own goals but make it seem as though she is instead helping her brother’s aims:

’Tis not so hard a task. It is no more But tell the king that Constabarus hid The suns of Babas, done to death before; And ’tis no more than Constabarus did. And tell him more, that I—for Herod’s sake, Not able to endure our brother’s foe— Did with a bill our separation make,

100 Though loath from Constabarus else to go. (3.2.37-44)169 For Salome, orchestrating her brother’s betrayal of Constabarus rather than her own makes her appear as though she is not hasty to betray her husband. This makes her seem a chaste lady, even though she does something so radical as create a bill of divorce, because she does it for her family’s sake rather than to suit her own desires. We can see her consider how to frame her position in ways that reflect the nomos that restricts her, as she makes sure to have Pheroras tell Herod that she only works in their best interests. She is quick to mention Herod’s own goals rather than her own, making her words measured and considered as opposed to the hasty retorts that Mariam is known for. Moreover, by only sharing this plan with her brother, she is keeping her speech-acts within the family, and no one outside of this exchange will know that she orchestrated Constabarus’s downfall. Though Salome, like Mariam, speaks out against her husband, she does so in a way that hides her true motives and therefore does not cast doubt upon her sexual behaviors. Salome, has made her speech mask her mental transgressions, so no physical transgressions can be suspected. The way she conducts her body and speech are aligned. She reassures Herod she is chaste and loyal to her brothers and her husband by not approaching him directly and tempering her speech to reflect what he needs to hear. Vives claims that, when preparing for marriage, a woman should not look as though she is actively seeking a husband, but instead let her family do the

169 Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry, ed. Ramona Wray (New York: Arden Early Modern Drama, 2012), 140.

101 arranging.170 Though Salome is arranging a violent divorce from her husband, she follows much the same advice and thus appears like a true virgin who “knows nothing of sexual union nor seeks after it.”171 Salome positions herself as a meek woman, speaking through her brother and only saying what Herod wants to hear. By keeping herself, body and speech, in the shadows, she makes herself appear modest and virginal, despite her unchaste longings. Cary contrasts Salome to the brash Mariam, who speaks against her husband in public. Salome knows the importance of her words and how they reflect upon her body, using kairos to only speak her mind behind the scenes. In addition to knowing how to convince both her brothers to do her bidding and avoid blame, Salome knows how to use Mariam’s speech practices against her. Salome believes she can manipulate her own speech, Mariam’s speech, and speech about Mariam in order to bring about Mariam’s ultimate downfall:

I scorn that she should live my birth t’upbraid, To call me base and hungry Edomite. With patient show her choler I betrayed, And watched the time to be revenged by sleight. Now, tongue of mine, with scandal load her name! Turn hers to fountains, Herod’s eyes to flame! Yet first I will begin Pheroras’ suit, That he my earnest business may effect, And I of Mariam will keep me mute Till first some other doth her name detect. (3.2.61-70)172

170 Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, Ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 155-157.

171 Ibid., 155.

172 Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry, ed. Ramona Wray (New York: Arden Early Modern Drama, 2012), 141-142.

102 In this monologue, once again spoken in the absence of all other characters, Salome fully owns her intentions and motivations toward Mariam. It is once again Mariam’s own words that work against her, this time about Salome’s low birth: “My birth thy baser birth so far excelled,/ …Thou parti-Jew, parti-Edomite,/ Thou mongrel, issued from rejected race!” (1.3.27-30).173 This insult betrays the “choler” of Mariam’s speech, exposing Mariam as one who uses the rashness brought on by her bodily imbalances to influence her language. Though Mariam acts as though she is not aware that her body and speech are connected, Salome knows the nomos that restricts women’s speech and works to expose this bond. Salome demonstrates her awareness of the connection between her body and her speech by once again mentioning her tongue, the intersection of both. Salome is able to hold her tongue, and this links the control of speech with control of the body. Mariam cannot help but speak her mind, even if it is better to be silent or appeasing rather than honest. Though Mariam is able to control her sexual body in that she can abstain from her husband even when she remains faithful to him, cannot control her tongue and therefore reveals her true feelings for Herod and his sister. Ultimately, it is Salome who triumphs over Mariam, for though she commits multiple sexual transgressions that do not benefit a lady, she is able to maintain a sexual reputation that is not so easily sullied. Mariam’s outward use of language makes her reputation more fragile than Salome’s insidious, though hard to detect, rhetorical manipulation. This is shown at the end of the play, when Herod curses Salome for her role in the plot, but eventually condemns his own actions instead: “I am the villain that have done the deed” (5.1.187).174 This proves that, by

173 Ibid., 95.

174 Ibid., 199.

103 holding her tongue until the right moment, Salome does not implicate her body as intervening in the actions of the day, and she is able to maintain her life and interests when Herod condemns even himself to die. Elizabeth Cary’s deliberate use of the closet drama form, and the action of publishing her work, both act in ways that amplify Salome’s message: female communication is fine as long as it goes undetected. Marta Straznicky explains that closet dramas, though often understood in opposition to stage dramas because they were written to be read instead of performed in public, were actually often performed in semi-public company and discussed “public” concepts. She goes on to illuminate:

Feminist scholars have demonstrated that women’s closet plays were explicitly engaged with contemporary political and philosophical debates. By extension the domestic contexts in which early modern women’s plays were written and read have themselves been reevaluated as sites of social activity rather than withdrawal or solitary retreat.175 Moreover, she explains that the concept of the “private” that is associated with the closet drama as opposed to commercial theatre actually allowed women to participate in the tradition because women could air political and philosophical discourse under the guise of private speech, and therefore proper womanhood.176 Cary uses a form associated with privacy and womanhood in order to echo and then subvert common conversations taking place about women’s education and public appearance. Cary’s

Mariam explicitly promotes the ideal that women should not speak in public with Mariam’s ultimate execution and the messages of the chorus, but this private

175 Marta Straznicky, Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2.

176 Ibid., 3.

104 negotiation of political views embodies the true message of the play in its physical format: overt modesty, covert influence. Cary joins the larger conversations of women’s education when she had her work published, putting her work in conversation with texts such as Vives’s. The play was printed by Thomas Creede, a man known for printing multiple plays, and sold by bookseller Richard Hawkins.177 It was published in 1613 in one quarto edition with two issues.178 Though it does not seem as though the drama was published past the 1613 edition, the fact that the play was entered into the public domain in a published forum means that Mariam was disseminated past Cary’s social circle, and able to be read more broadly. Once again, Cary is behaving like Salome: masquerading as a virtuous woman, but subtly entering her voice into the wider world. Cary published the play under the title “that learned, virtuous and truly noble Lady, E.C.”179 Cary was acknowledged as a woman, but her exact name and title are obscured by initials. Moreover, it is thought that the dedication leaf, which is missing in all but two surviving copies, was taken out after the play left Cary’s personal circle and moved into the public domain, in order to remove identifying information.180 Cary lets her thoughts and ideas circulate broadly, but like Salome, personally identifying information or motivation is kept out of the public domain. By making this available,

177 Ramona Wray, introduction to The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry, ed. Ramona Wray (New York: Arden Early Modern Drama, 2012), 8.

178 Ibid., 56.

179 Ibid., 70.

180 Ibid., 56.

105 women could subvert men privately, in reading and in performing the drama. Though Salome is no role model, she demonstrates how reticence in language can preserve a woman’s reputation. Larson claims that the fact that so many conduct manuals tell women to moderate their speech actually means that women most likely spoke in public often.181 Cary provides contrasting advice to these conduct manuals for women willing to search for it: that a woman can get by just on the force of her words rather than her deeds, if she knows how to position her speech correctly. She aligns herself with women who speak in public, and gives them advice for how to do so correctly. Mariam and Salome’s contrasting endings demonstrate how female rhetoric was linked to female sexuality in the Renaissance, in that chastity was often proven by reputation alone. Guarding a woman’s reputation is as important as her virtue itself, and this equates the speaking woman with the sexualized woman. However, the history of Cary’s closet drama demonstrates that Cary was far from a silent woman who encouraged silent women. Moreover, the ultimate fate of Salome demonstrates that, though she is maligned for her lack of chastity and her barbed speech, the woman who knows how to use her speech and body in ways that conform to others’ expectations can do what she pleases. Cary demonstrates that female rhetoric can benefit women if communicated right. Though the play seems to be teaching women silence, it rewards women who speak in ways that outwardly conform to expectations while they benefit themselves under the radar. Like the form of the closet drama, which on the surface conforms to the gendered expectation of private reading but can participate in public conversations, Cary’s play ultimately preaches the appearance of

181 Larson, Katherine R. Early Modern Women in Conversation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 34-35.

106 conformity. Under this conformity, however, Mariam radically advocates for women to feed their own needs and desires subtly. Mariam, the ostensibly perfect woman, ends the play condemned by her own words. Smooth-tongued Salome, on the other hand, gets everything she desires by keeping her speech controlled. The characters of Mariam and Salome teach how women in the Renaissance were both restricted and free to speak their minds and communicate with their bodies.

107 Chapter 4

MARY WROTH, ROMANCE, AND MAKING THE FEMALE OBJECT A SUBJECT

This chapter engages with the life and works of Mary Wroth, author of a published romance, Urania, a published sonnet sequence, “From Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” and an unpublished play, Love’s Victory. Through an examination of her chosen genres, her depictions of female characters, and the ways that she herself is constantly reinvented in scholarship, this chapter demonstrates how Wroth’s language of virtue, bodies, and play both gives rise to a strict morality for the women she creates and simultaneously undercuts it, making her writing and rhetoric as complex as her life. My project in this dissertation is to understand how we can reinterpret and reimagine the rhetorics used by women writers of the past. I start this chapter therefore with a look at headnotes in Norton textbooks and how they frame women writers, package their lives and their writing, for students. I then move into the larger scholarly interpretations of Wroth, and engage with Wroth’s modes of characterization, which enable me to address how she shows rhetoric to be a tool both to create and undercut the virtues that women were so often expected to develop. Throughout this chapter, I show how depictions of Wroth and Wroth’s depictions of women, taken together, use language to create the virtues that women are supposed to have, and then use the same language to subvert these virtues, to change them, and to move past them. Using Wroth herself, and then Dalina, a character indicative of the women who undermine

108 the morality created in Wroth’s work, I show the simultaneous connection between rhetoric and virtues, and rhetoric and subversion. I start my chapter where many readers often start their relationship with the writers they study: in the headnotes included in the Norton Anthology of English Literature. When reading the anthology with my British Literature students, I noticed that several authors’ headnotes, rather than being benign and descriptive, were instead laden with personal input and value judgment from the editors. For example, Margaret Cavendish gets an introduction that mostly describes Cavendish’s writings as oddities, claiming that most of her works “were published at the Newcastles’ own expense” and that “at the time they elicited more derision than praise.” 182 Her works, then, were included in the anthology mostly because of her prolific publishing and her “fragmentary poetics.”183 In stark contrast to the language that seems to wish to justify the inclusion of Cavendish’s work, Andrew Marvell’s biography, merely a hundred pages before, claims that his “finest poems are second to none in this or any other period,” an honor apparently objectively bestowed upon him by the book editors.184 The difference between Cavendish’s headnote and Marvell’s exemplifies Laurie Fink’s concept of the “hidden curriculum”—a curriculum learned through the forms that education takes rather than the stated outcomes (and found in features such as headnotes), where students internalize the individual glory of those written about

182 The Norton Anthology of English Literature, The Sixteenth Century and the Early Seventeenth Century, vol. B, 9th ed, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 2012), 1885.

183 Ibid.

184 Ibid., 1789.

10 9 rather than the structural conditions that benefitted or inhibited them.185 Students learn, from the difference in their editorial introductions, that Marvell is an obvious inclusion in the text, while Cavendish is there because she wrote, but not because of the quality of her work. This hidden curriculum primes students to read Marvell’s poems with an eye to excellence and Cavendish’s works with an eye to eccentricity—a large gap for two authors in the same collection. While the concept of the “hidden curriculum” exposes the different messages students get from editorial apparatuses such as headnotes, I turned to theories of the genre of the headnote itself to understand how such a curriculum is formed with the values of those who compose such materials. As one editor offers, the purpose of the headnote is to give students a starting point for an author: “In seeking to direct the reader, [the headnote] typically links the text(s)-to-come with the author (a biography), his or her other work (an oeuvre), a tradition or set of texts (a canon) and a topic or topics defining the field (a problem)… It is part of a project of enlightenment, clarification, and demystification.” 186 Here, Vincent B. Leitch defines the image that we, readers and editors alike, choose to hold onto of the headnote: mostly background information that at least seems impartial in its efforts to provide students with needed information before they approach the text. To underline this purpose, Leitch outlines the primary goals of the headnote against the goals of criticism: “The headnote is by

185 Laurie Fink, “The Hidden Curriculum,” in “Symposium: Editing a Norton Anthology,” College English 66, no. 2 (Nov. 2003): 190. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3594265.

186 Vincent B. Leitch, “Editing a Norton Anthology,” in “Symposium: Editing a Norton Anthology,” College English 66, no. 2 (Nov. 2003): 175.

110 tradition unsigned, impartial, more or less objective, disinterested discourse. Conversely, critique typically consists of a signed, partisan, interested intervention expressed in the name of a committed point of view usually linked with a group.”187 Instead of seeking to understand and intervene, headnotes, when done correctly, should work to outline and describe. Readers of anthologies are meant to see the line between the headnote, which purportedly gives background information, and critique, which examines text from a particular point of view and with a specifically designated purpose. Despite the goals of the headnote, entries in the Norton Anthology of English Literature show that the editors of such anthologies’ personal opinions and ideas often push the genre to venturing into criticism and opinion, thus creating the “hidden curriculum” in a genre that many students approach for background knowledge rather than targeted critique. The blurring of description and subjective intervention present in these headnotes create an entry into understanding Mary Wroth’s position in scholarship—one that simultaneously glorifies Wroth subjectively and attempts to position her as the sum of her familial parts. The hidden curriculums seen so far expose the judgments made by the editors and passed down to the students, and while the curriculums hidden in Mary Wroth’s headnote are not as damning as Cavendish’s, nor as celebratory as Marvell’s, they still expose the specific ways Wroth has been interpreted by scholars and novices alike.

Her introduction focuses on what sets her apart and how she achieved such distinction:

[Mary Wroth’s] achievement was fostered by her strong sense of identity as a Sidney, heir to the literary talent and cultural role of her famous uncle Sir Philip Sidney, her famous Aunt, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, who may have served as mentor to her;

187 Ibid.

111 and her father Robert Sidney, Viscount Lisle, author of a recently discovered sonnet sequence. But she used that heritage transgressively to replace heroes with heroines in genres employed by the male Sidney authors—notably Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia—transforming their gender politics and exploring the poetics and situation of women writers.188

The Norton introduction positions her predominantly in the context of her Sidney family connections, even calling her “the most prolific, self-conscious, and impressive female author of the Jacobean era” (though note the “female” marker here, as Marvell’s poems are not given the same or any kind of qualifier).189 Her positioning as a Sidney makes sense within the pages of the Norton, as her uncle Sir Philip Sidney and her aunt Mary Sidney Herbert are both included in the anthology before her.190 This “hidden curriculum” teaches my students just how influenced Wroth was by the writing and legacy of her uncle and aunt, even as she uses this legacy for “transgressive” purposes. While Wroth’s headnote is far from the dismissive tone of Cavendish’s, her contribution to the canon is depicted as indebted to her connections to her family rather than to her own merit, and her position in the text is because of her life as a woman and a Sidney and less for the power or influence that her words had at the time or may have today. I start with these headnotes to show the ways that readers today interpret texts through the conceptions and values we inherit through such editorial apparatuses.

188 The Norton Anthology of English Literature, The Sixteenth Century and the Early Seventeenth Century, vol. B, 9th ed, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 2012), 1560.

189 Ibid.

190 Ibid., 1038, 1102.

112 Wroth, especially to new students of British literature, is defined through the “hidden curriculum” found in the conversation around her, and therefore limited by the ways that she has been interpreted previously. Recent scholarship attempts to open up this curriculum to understand Wroth as part of a broader knowledge-making world. Katherine R. Larson, Naomi J. Miller, and Andrew Strycharski introduce the concept of “Wrothian Networks” as a way of examining Wroth within and through the connections that are made between her work and others—looking at the connections Wroth had in her own time, of course, but also at the feminist frameworks that have structured her scholarship so far and the new examinations of form and genre that connect Wroth’s writing to modes of early modern writing.191 In order to push past the hidden curriculums inherent in Wroth scholarship and think instead in terms of these “Wrothian networks,” this chapter engages with both the characters Wroth creates and the depictions scholars today create of Wroth herself to understand what a woman needs to be to be considered a writer and an intellectual. I connect “Wrothian networks” to rhetoric, which I define here as explicit references to speech, writing, and education, used to develop important concepts such as virtues that matter to her characters. Looking at the way language is used—naming, conversation, games, speech, and writing—I examine how it works in service of image and virtue, and, curiously, characters who have neither. As rhetoric was classically part of an education to create a moral individual, rhetoric here serves to develop virtues in the women using it—even when they are not moral in the classical sense. Specifically, through an understanding of the virtueless woman present in Wroth’s play Love’s

191 Katherine R. Larson and Naomi J. Miller with Andrew Strycharski, “Re-Reading Mary Wroth: Networks of Knowing,” in Re-Reading Mary Wroth, edited by Katherine R. Larson and Naomi J. Miller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 2-4.

113 Victory and the many ways Wroth depicts female characters, I work to construct a reading of Wroth that pays attention to how women are thought of, written, and discussed, and how Wroth often undermines these expectations. Wroth both creates female virtues, ones that are only embodied fully by or expected of her female characters, and then undercuts them by creating more options through speech, conversation, writing, and naming for the female characters who do not conform to these virtues. Through a model of creating and undercutting virtues through speech, conversation, and games, more opportunities for women characters are created, both within the play and outside it. In like fashion, this chapter aims to create spaces for women in the rhetorical canon by opening up the ways we think about women writers, and including drama and characters into our way of thinking.

Creating Emotions, Undercutting Virtues As my earlier discussion of headnotes and “Wrothian networks” demonstrated, scholars choose the frameworks they pass on to readers and students. In this section I define the frameworks I have chosen in my reading of Wroth’s writing. I argue that Wroth’s female characters use rhetoric to create options based on their possession or lack of innate virtues. Her characters’ choices to speak and write can be used to understand the ways that female bodies, sexualities, and desires are communicated through rhetorical choice and current modes of rhetorical interpretation. In this section, I define my use of feminist rhetoric and discussion of virtues and the body in Wroth’s works. Thomas Wilson, in his 1560 treatise The Art of Rhetoric, defines “the End of Rhetoric” with a simple, numbered list:

1. To teach

114 2. To delight 3. And to persuade.192

I join this definition to the nuanced study of feminist rhetoric, complicating Wilson’s original aims with how and why we focus on feminist rhetoric today. In the introduction to Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture, Jacqueline Jones Royster calls for researchers to resist official narratives and search for better interpretive frames that speak for the many rather than the few.193 Royster’s discussion of the intersection between rhetoric and identity builds a link between the subject of scholarship and those researching and reading these accounts, a connection I explore through an emphasis on reading Wroth with an eye to the ways her characters can be interpreted and used to push boundaries today. Hui Wu refines these assertions, and argues that the ways we understand women writers through modern feminism is still routed through binaries, albeit new binaries, coupled with patriarchal definitions of rhetoric and modern interpretations of feminism.194 While the binaries of old are replaced with new binaries—liberal vs. conservative women, for example, that we use to think about whether women belong in the feminist rhetoric canon—we are still conforming to patriarchal assumptions about women and their

192 Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric (1560), edited with notes and commentary by Peter E. Medine (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 46.

193 Jacqueline Jones Royster, “Marking Trails in Studies of Race, Gender, and Culture,” in Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture, edited by Jacqueline Jones Royster and Ann Marie Mann Simpkins (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 7.

194 Hui Wu, “The Paradigm of Margaret Cavendish: Reading Women’s Alternate Rhetorics in a Global Context,” in Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture, edited by Jacqueline Jones Royster and Ann Marie Mann Simpkins (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 171-185.

115 choices. I work with Wu’s ideas to counter past and present binaries, first by understanding normative frameworks of gender, sexuality, and power and then showing how Wroth’s characters can push against them. Using these definitions of feminist rhetoric, I engage with the ways that women are written by Wroth and how their use of language and games connects to Wroth’s depictions of women’s emotions, virtues, and lives—and how we conceptualize these lives today. I use the conceptions of rhetoric positioned by Wilson, Royster, and Wu to frame the way I read Wroth’s depictions of language about virtues and female bodies, ones that simultaneously give a specific sense of morality and then subverts this morality the same way. Wu asks us to push past patriarchal binaries, and Wroth’s work often does just this—creating and then subverting virtues so that virtuousness and virtuelessness are far from the only two choices laid out for women. Wroth’s works argue for virtues, creating a moral directive throughout her works. At the same time, an acknowledgement of the body, and the fallen position of the human condition, makes fulfilling this argument impossible. In other words, the body strives for the virtues that Wroth builds up, but is ultimately too fallen to achieve such morality. Lyn Bennett shows this impossible bind in Wroth’s use of “profane love”—a divine love that is still felt through the body and the bodily emotions.195 This connects the body and the written word, with emotions inscribed on the page creating a cosmic virtue out of love made from the human body. Two stanzas from the third sonnet in From Pamphilia to Amphilanthus create the bond between the body, love, and virtue:

Yet is there hope. Then love but play thy part;

195 Lyn Bennett, Women Writing of Divinest Things: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Pembroke, Wroth, and Lanyer (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004), 105.

116 Remember well thyself and think on me, Shine in those eyes which conquered have my heart, And see if mine be slack to answer thee.

Lodge in that breast and, pity move to be For flames which in mine burn in truest smart, Exiling thoughts that touch inconstancy, Or those which waste not in the constant art.196

The binaries in this poem create and subvert the virtue of constancy that Wroth identifies as important towards the end of this selection of verse. Wroth’s nod to the “eye,” “heart,” and “breast” grounds her discussion of love in a human body, creating specific locations for the love that burns within the narrator. These very physical depictions contrast against her references to the “flames” of passion that move love into a more metaphysical realm, as the flames are not nearly as literal as the body that contains them. The twinned concepts of constancy and inconstancy move away from the body and the metaphor of the flames into a moral conception of love. The divinity of love is seen in the idealism of constancy, but constancy is upheld and subverted at once within the lines. The concept of “inconstancy,” paired with the bodily concept of “touch,” is encountered before the reader ever reaches the ideal. While constancy is eventually upheld, it is cut down before it is ever found. Constancy is at once defined by human betrayal and divine devotion to love, and it is stored in bodies and hearts as the vessel for such a divine virtue. Wroth’s poem persuades the reader to strive for constancy, showing the physical and emotional strength the narrator needs to remain constant. At the same time, though, the physicality of the poem makes the work for constancy a failure before it is ever achieved. Her argument is undermined before it

196 Mary Wroth, From Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, in “Mary Wroth’s Poetry: An Electronic Edition,” ed. Paul Salzman, last modified June 15, 2012, http://wroth.latrobe.edu.au/all-poems.html.

117 can come to fruition. Wroth creates and dismantles the virtue of constancy through her conception of profane love, and we as readers must push past our own binaries to understand the benefits and limitations of the virtues that Wroth’s writing displays. While the concept of profane love creates and undermines virtues in her poetry, Wroth’s connections between love, virtue, and the body exist across her works, and persuade her readers to strive for virtuousness even when their bodies betray them. Wroth’s Urania explores the concept of love, the divinity of love, and the virtues borne of constancy in love, which creates virtues that her characters are meant to uphold even when they harm as much as help. Wroth’s main characters in Urania, Urania and Pamphilia, find themselves at The Towers of Venus. These towers sort lovers by the virtues they demonstrate, judging who is true by their innate goodness and outward behaviors:

Here is the triall of false or faithfull Lovers. Those that are false, may enter this Towre, which is Cupids Towre, or the Towre of Desire: but therein once inclosed, they endure torments fit for such a fault. Into the second any Lover may enter, which is the Towre of Love: but there they suffer unexpressable tortures, in severall kindes as their affections are most incident to; as Jealosie, Despaire, Feare, Hope, Longings, and such like. The third which is guarded by Constancy, can bee entred by none, till the valiantest Knight, with the loyallest Lady come together, and open that gate, when all these Charmes shal have conclusion. Till then, all that venture into these Towres, remaine prisoners; this is the truth.197 The focus on constancy over all creates a value system through the towers and builds a virtue that lovers both simultaneously strive for and fail to meet. Once again, Wroth creates a focus on the body, emotion, and virtue that are enforced even as they

197 Lady Mary Wroth, The First Part of the Contess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), 48.

118 acknowledge that few to no lovers could live up to such a system. Wroth shows the ways that love is present in the body by making love present in the towers: physical representations of love and of ways that love can fail. In addition, the torments listed are emotional, and experienced within the body: “Jealosie, Despaire, Feare, Hope, Longings” are all internal tortures innately linked to love already. It is only those who demonstrate constancy, Wroth’s chosen virtue, that can love properly. Wroth’s focus on constancy develops a virtue that must be upheld to release all those locked in love (and the Towers’) torment, but at the same time she shows how most lovers are not able to demonstrate this virtue. Kim Walker writes about the issue of desire in Wroth’s works, and argues that Wroth refuses to focus on divine, symbolic female love. Instead, Wroth deliberately grounds love in the body and the physical reality of women.198 While love is metaphysical or divine, female lovers are grounded in their bodily realities. Bennett’s discussion of From Pamphilia to Amphilanthus engages with the ways Wroth conflates divine love with bodily love, and how the sacred must be connected with the profane in order to recognize the divine in daily life.199 Love is described here as both divine (as the Towers are tributes to Venus) and of the body, and both the torments of the towers and the virtue that will save those locked within them are present in her characters at once. The twining of body and virtue argues for the importance of love and constancy, but also shows the weakness of those who strive for these virtues.

198 Kim Walker, “‘This strang labourinth’: Lady Mary Wroth,” in Women Writers of the English Renaissance (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 176.

199 Lyn Bennett, Women Writing of Divinest Things: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Pembroke, Wroth, and Lanyer (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004), 147.

119 Wroth’s Towers, the ways that they sort lovers, and how their presence judges lovers based on their values demonstrates the power language has over actions and emotions, and the ways that language can exert control over the body and virtue alike. The abstraction of love into Towers reframes the idea of love away from just a romantic ideal into a way to classify lovers by their raw emotions and the values created through such bodily reactions. The Towers’ powers discern the different ways that lovers can interact, giving the choice of the tower to the couple and agency to end the curse to those who have the purest love. Several types of emotional states are listed: “desire” for falsity, “jealosie, dispaire, feare, hope, longings” for a typical love, that is true but not perhaps perfect, and “constancy” for the purest form of love. Wroth’s sorting of love is a desire to classify, through language, the virtues present. The sorting present in Urania calls to mind modern classifications of love and sexuality. One such system is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet, which uses language to reclassify the ways we think of sexuality, defining sexuality through acts instead of partners or gender.200 Similarly, Wroth expands the way readers can think of categories for love and sexuality, because she sorts couples through their emotions and devotions rather than any other potential marker. While this is not a new concept for the modern reader, it still gives different ways to classify relationships that are driven by emotion rather than gender or another category, as emotion and devotion are the primary ways of measuring their connections rather than by gender or partner. It is innate, bodily concepts—emotion and virtue—that create the value of the lovers, and they must choose themselves which category they fit into,

200 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Epistemology of the Closet,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004): 916-918.

120 through the descriptions given. While so much of modern conceptions of relationships and sexuality are based on outward perception, Wroth gives the choice of devotion to her characters, along with the knowledge that most will fail. Wroth uses the towers to explore the emotions latent in relationships that have both, and to use “constancy” as the defining categorization for pure connection. Wroth’s Urania creates categories for women to use to define their feelings, rather than to assume all love or all relationships look the same. The Towers of Venus create a system that allows lovers the space and the language to advocate for themselves, all while knowing that their choices may be undermined by their very bodily realities. Wroth’s texts create and undermine arguments for virtues, creating space for women who both exemplify the virtues created and defy them through their own choices of language and emotions. Those that exemplify—the chief of whom in Urania are Pamphilia and Urania—are complex characters whose emotional state is explored throughout the work, exposing a link between the body and the communicated word. Amoral women also populate Wroth’s works, demonstrating by their negativity what it means to be a moral woman in the first place. These women, such as Love’s Victory’s Dalina, act as foils to the main characters, but they are not always punished in predictable ways for their lack of morality. Like the spaces in

Wroth’s poems and Urania, which allow for failure even as the virtues are introduced,

Dalina is given space to succeed even when she cannot uphold the morals presented in the text. Through the categories that the lovers are sorted into, the connection between the body and virtue, and understanding women through their own emotions, Wroth’s characters use language to understand and subvert the virtues of love to which they are held.

121 Concurrently with Dalina, I look at Wroth’s depictions in current scholarship to see how she functions in conceptions of women’s writers and how she could be useful in history of rhetoric and feminist rhetoric timelines. I connect these two ideas to examine how Wroth crafts her characters and how she is crafted as a character by others—how is Wroth’s writing used to understand her, and how can we use attention to her writing, her use of kairos and rhetorical games and focus on specific moments of speech and writing to conceptualize why she is useful to us, particularly for feminist rhetors who look for women using rhetorical theories and tools in the archives.

Frameworks for Wroth’s Life and Works This section examines the ways that Wroth has been defined by scholars and critics, examining the hidden curriculums and choices of frameworks that have been made and passed on around Wroth in the scholarship devoted to her. Here, I examine the ways that Wroth herself is constructed as a figure in the scholarship about her, and how the work of scholars also creates and subverts binaries when discussing women, writing, and virtue. The hidden curriculums found in anthologies and courses can also linger in scholarship, and in this section I work to examine the assumptions made and undercut in Wroth scholarship. I revisit Hui Wu’s rebuke of binaries used to understand women writers even in modern feminism to analyze how Wroth has been understood both historically and in modern feminist approaches to her work. Scholars construct Wroth through a focus on education, speech, and her choices in writing to understand her body, choices in her life, and her personal connections. Wroth’s work creates and subverts morals, and scholarship about Wroth picks up on binaries as well, creating and subverting understandings of Wroth as a writer that parallel her own works. I use the idea of Wroth, thinking about how she is created as a figure in

122 scholarship, to understand the ways that we use her in history: as an avatar to understand what writing meant as an early modern woman. Rather than arguing against any particular reading of Wroth, I work to understand why the lenses used are picked up in the first place, to conceptualize Wroth as a writer and as a figure for modern scholars to understand. The remainder of this section defines previous understandings of Wroth by pointing out binary representations of her work with two paired subsections: biography and women’s writing, and genre and male influence, placing my argument within these binaries. I pair these ideas not because biography is or should necessarily be aligned with women’s writing or genre with male influence, but because pairing them demonstrates the ways we categorize writing—either through her life and sequestered with other women authors to parse the characteristics they share, or through genre and male influence, to see the broader connections between Wroth’s writing and the early modern world of predominantly male writers around her. In this sense, I posit our modern understanding of Wroth as a figure, one that, in the final section, is put in conversation with the characters that Wroth herself created, able to both fulfill and undercut expectations placed upon them. Mary Wroth exists today as a figure of a writer whose works create a place for women to be found in otherwise masculine traditions, someone who defines binaries by crossing them. Thus, readers value—and find values represented—in her works through the ways women are represented in speaking roles and positions that men usually inhabit. Critical works such as Reading Mary Wroth and Re-Reading Mary Wroth, a collection and a follow-up published 24 years later, contextualize Wroth in the wider scope of scholarship and work as a starting point for understanding Wroth scholarship writ large—a microcosm of the shifts made in the scholarship about Wroth

123 over time. In a manner reminiscent of her Norton headnote, the earlier collection, published in 1991, focuses in a large part on familial connections, historical reception, and the concept of gender in Wroth’s works and her work’s interpretations. 201 Wroth is mostly defined through her family and biography, using these ideas as the frame for the ways that Wroth is thought about, theorized, and discussed in the scholarship represented in the collection. This reading is similar to the discussion of Wroth as a woman writer and member of the Sidney family included in her Norton headnote, and shows a Wroth steeped in local writing culture and heavily influenced by those writing around her, particularly in her family. When value is found in Wroth’s representations of women, however, these depictions of Wroth can over-invest in the figure of Wroth as a writing woman, engaging with her life and not her language. By contrast, Re-Reading Mary Wroth moves from early representations of Wroth to newer conceptions that use forms and genres both in and to build connections among the scholarship included. The subdivisions here indicate an expansion of the ways that scholars can read Wroth. In their introduction, Larson, Miller, and Strycharski claim that, “while it is clear that the interest in authorship and biography that characterized the first wave of recovery work in early modern women’s writing in the late 1980s and early 1990s continues to flourish,” they see the newer work being done as showing “the need to consider women’s writing as actively contributing to and constitutive of innovative and

201 Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller, and Gary Waller (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1991).

124 influential networks in early modern culture.”202 The second collection is positioned then so that it can create a wider framework and scope than was originally available when the first collection was published. Through this, the ways that Wroth is understood—through the networks to which she belonged when she was alive and the networks scholars create when her work is read—shows expansion and room for new analysis. Through these two works, we can see value in different frameworks around Wroth and different versions of Wroth in scholarship, and the subsections following explore these frameworks through biography, gender, genre, and connections to male writers.

Biography and Women’s Writing The conversations created in and through the “Wrothian networks” defined in the introduction show different aspects of Wroth as a figure for those who study her— Wroth through her family, Wroth through the lens of other women writers, Wroth through the way her education and life influenced her works, Wroth through the lens of history and her place in it—and define the values found in her writing for those who study it. Using these networks as a framework, I explore the ways that biography and the discussion about women’s writing create a modern understanding of Wroth, and use this understanding to undercut binaries in our assumptions of Wroth, find places where Wroth fits into our conceptions of feminist rhetoric, and use her space in modern thought to examine how we can use Wroth’s life and works to better understand emotion, virtues, love, and women’s writing. With life, family, and gender,

202 Katherine R. Larson and Naomi J. Miller with Andrew Strycharski, “Re-Reading Mary Wroth: Networks of Knowing,” in Re-Reading Mary Wroth, edited by Katherine R. Larson and Naomi J. Miller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 4.

125 Wroth can be understood in part through the events of her life, the connections in her family, and her relationships with other women to build a context for the works that Wroth has created. Writing does not happen in a vacuum, after all, and these lenses name and define the influences for Wroth’s texts that can be found in her life and the world around her. Examining these choices puts the focus on the arguments created around Wroth and about Wroth, and shows the value in using Wroth as a figure in today’s assessments of history and feminism. As evidenced in the Norton Anthology and the original Reading Mary Wroth collection, biography is a looming presence in understanding women’s writing, particularly in conceptualizing women from the past. This can provide a figure of a writing woman for feminists to look back at, but also can flatten Wroth’s language into mere depictions of her world, forcing Wroth and her writing alike to conform to the values of 17th century England without question. The first modern lenses through which to view Wroth’s work came with the reintroduction of Wroth into print circulation, and as such the first scholarly writing on Wroth as a figure often mention biography as an aspect of her works to give a brief introduction to the life of the person behind the writings. Josephine A. Roberts’ modern republications of Wroth’s works, published from 1983 through 1999, reintroduced Mary Wroth into the feminist conversation starting around women’s writing in the Renaissance. Roberts’ The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth pairs a republication of Wroth’s poetry with an introduction that details Wroth’s life, focusing on her family’s connections to court, Wroth’s own connections to literary circles, and the potential controversies that enveloped Wroth later in life, including her publication of Urania and the birth of her two children out

126 of wedlock.203 The way Roberts discusses Wroth grounds her work in her familial connections and her choices, as, for example, when she notes a strong connection between Wroth’s literary choices and those of her uncle, Sir Philip Sidney.204 Roberts uses the figure of Wroth to justify republication for her works, asserting that Wroth’s gender and her familial pedigree justify a closer look at her poetry and romance, thus making the argument for Wroth to be read seriously once again. While Roberts’ work and Reading Mary Wroth show the large amount of discussion about Wroth’s life and biography that comes up in scholarship, particularly early scholarship, the first full-length biography on Mary Wroth was published in 2010. A deeper understanding of Wroth’s life through biographical readings dispels with some mythologies that crop up around Wroth at the same time that it pinpoints her usefulness as a figure to modern readers. While there was a long tradition to understand Wroth through her life and her family, with the full biography came a challenge to the codified ideals of Wroth that came before it. The misconceptions about Wroth’s life that abounded were fueled in part by the fact that, other than her fiction, Wroth left little written record behind of her own life. Margaret P. Hannay’s Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth dispels some common ideas about Wroth’s life that are repeatedly mentioned in the scholarship. Wroth’s difficult marriage is one such assumption, as her later affair with her cousin William Herbert to whom she was close as a child led researchers to assume that her marriage in the interim was a difficult

203 Josephine A. Roberts, introduction to The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Baton Rogue: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 16, 29.

204 Ibid., 50.

127 one.205 Hannay’s work counteracts this assumption, claiming instead that there is no indication that Wroth was unhappy with her husband, despite the clear pining of characters such as Pamphilia in Urania who do remain constant toward early relationships between cousins, much like Wroth’s own.206 While many read Pamphilia as an avatar for Wroth herself, Hannay challenges any attempts to understand Wroth through the actions of her characters. For example, Pamphilia wears black to her wedding to someone other than Amphilanthus, and Hannay claims definitively that Wroth did not wear black at her own wedding. 207 Despite the similarities between the characters and their situations, many details in Wroth’s works were chosen rather than depicting her life directly. Hannay’s work shows that Wroth made the choice to include details about pining and constancy, rather than reproducing her life on the page. Through a more nuanced understanding of Wroth’s life, a foundation for the figure who created her works is built and the networks in which she lived are illuminated. Biography gives us ways to imagine the lives of women writing in early modern England, but it also feeds a desire to find life in fiction, which can potentially undercut understanding and appreciation for Wroth’s creativity and choices made in her writing. Biographical understandings set up a foundation for viewing Wroth as a figure: a woman created through her family, her choices, and ultimately, her publications.

With an eye to her familial connections, Wroth becomes a figure shaped by the values

205 Margaret P. Hannay, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 98-99.

206 Ibid.

207 Ibid., 99-100.

128 those closest to her espoused. The influence and power the Sidneys had both in early modern England and in Wroth’s own life gives Wroth a familial base through which some scholars choose to read her works. Gary Waller’s The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of Gender connects Wroth’s work to her Sidney foundations and to her affair with her cousin, building an understanding of her legacy out of her familial and personal, sometimes intimate, connections.208 Waller builds these connections through current understandings of gender, family, and the public/ private divide, to better understand what a family romance entails and the ways the lives of those living this romance can be refigured through conceptions of gender.209 An essay by Marion Wynne-Davies grounds its discussions in similar frameworks of the Sidney family, a depiction of Wroth that locates her within the Sidney/ Herbert family and also within the larger context of familial discourse and writing in early modern England. Wynne-Davies writes about the ways that Wroth exists both within the scope of the Sidney family discourse and how she pushes against it.210 She uses Wroth’s play Love’s Victory to examine the familial allegories in the text, and how Wroth moves from a family focus to a coterie of fellow authors. Wynne-Davies concludes that Wroth challenges familial ties, moving instead to a tradition of authorial commonalities.211 By choosing to

208 Gary Waller, The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of Gender (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993).

209 Ibid., 17, 53.

210 Marion Wynne-Davies, Women Writers and Familial Discourse in the English Renaissance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 90.

211 Ibid., 103.

129 understand Wroth at least in part through her family, this scholarship has located Wroth’s writings within her privilege and connections, showing how her literary interests were fostered and crafted by those around her, even if she uses familial connections in strange ways or pushes against these understandings. These are deliberate representations of Wroth as a figure, created to understand her choices and works. The Wroth created here is one contextualized within those she knew in life and how she wrote within and against their traditions of family and text. Framed in the context of her gender as well as her family, thinking of Wroth through the lens of woman writers leads us to connect her to the values, stereotypes, and biases often thrust upon women who enter the public domain through their writing. Naomi J. Miller’s Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England positions Wroth in ways that do not just figure her within her familial history—rather than through biography, Miller calls readers of Wroth to examine depictions of women in Wroth’s writing.212 As Miller states, “Previous critics have treated Wroth primarily in relation to her male literary predecessors, most notably in the Sidney family, without much attention to other contemporary voices.”213 Miller instead focuses on the female subject in woman- authored texts, digging into the ways women are represented in early modern works as a whole by examining Wroth’s oeuvre.214 Miller locates Wroth through her gender, focusing on the connections that can be made across early modern women’s writing

212 Naomi J. Miller, Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996).

213 Ibid., 1.

214 Ibid., 4-5.

130 because of their similarities as female authors. Through this lens, Wroth’s gender is important because of the ways it links her to her female characters and other women writers alike. While this gives validity to Wroth’s choices as a woman and builds connections to other women authors that may otherwise be ignored, this framework can also overemphasize difficulty and oppression over the privileges in Wroth’s life, or ignore relationships with men that did affect Wroth’s choices. Regardless of the drawbacks, this version of the figure of Wroth is created within the structures of gender and the relationships with other women that Wroth had, which could influence the women she writes in turn. Though the lenses of her family, her gender, and her life, Wroth herself is created and undercut by different ways scholars can use her and her connections to others, to her gender, and between her life and her characters.

Genre and Male Influence This next subsection engages with scholars who read Wroth within masculine frameworks of understanding within science, drama, and genre, and connects this understanding of Wroth with her use of the closet drama genre for her play Love’s Victory. I call these frameworks “masculine” not to warn against reading Wroth into masculine-dominated trajectories, but instead to represent how reading Wroth scientifically or in the literary canon juxtaposes Wroth against systems set up by and benefiting men, as all these categories were dominated by male voices. When we break Wroth away from being read through her biography, we still read her through patriarchal understandings of women and writing—because these interpretations cannot be avoided, only acknowledged and understood. The binary created here, of biography and female spaces, or genre and masculine frameworks, restricts the ways that we see Wroth, but acknowledging that they exist gives ways to make connections

131 between the binary conceptions to move past the limited ways that we categorize women authors. Works that demonstrate how women use masculine genres to write about women’s issues give scholars one way to bridge the divide. To finish this section, I discuss Wroth’s use of the closet drama genre and how it affects the representation of rhetoric and choice in Love’s Victory, positioning my own reading within the frameworks mentioned here. Wroth points out and then undercuts the traditions of genres that typically have excluded women’s voices by deliberately using these genres and then introducing women’s voices, actively subverting their exclusion of women as narrators and subjects. At first glance, this looks like another binary—masculine forms versus feminine concerns—but through viewing the ways that Wroth uses form, the ways her work and our interpretations of her work move can break our readings out of this one- or-the-other mindset. Mary B. Moore and Natasha Distiller both discuss how Wroth explores form through Petrarchan sonnets in her From Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Distiller argues that, in taking the form of the Petrarchan sonnet and using a woman’s voice, Wroth’s poetry exposes the lack of a place for a female subject in the sonnet tradition.215 Moore’s work examines the form of Wroth’s sonnets through her allusion to the labyrinth, engaging with her deliberately puzzling form and the reasons she makes language difficult in her poetry.216 Moore also discusses female subjectivity in relation to the labyrinth, showing how Wroth hides throughout the twists of her

215 Natasha Distiller, Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 80-81.

216 Mary B. Moore, Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 125-127.

132 language, which, ironically, allow her to develop her subjectivity.217 These texts show how the previously exclusively male genre of the sonnet becomes a place Wroth uses to gain a space in a patriarchal sphere for a deliberately female-gendered sonnet sequence. Similarly, Elaine V. Beilin discusses the form of the romance and Urania, and how the patriarchal origins of the form both allow Wroth room to change the genre and constrict her.218 Beilin’s work places Wroth in the context of other romance writers and examines the choices Wroth makes through the frame of gender and genre. Studying Wroth through her use of genre and her choice to publish both her sonnet sequence and Urania, uses writing to push back at the binaries constricting Wroth and creates narratives for women that play with and deny the binaries at play in her own work. Looking at genre and male writers’ influence in Wroth’s works locates her in the history of early modern writing and creates a figure of Wroth engaged in reading and commenting on the major thoughts and discoveries, immersed in the values of her age. Sheila T. Cavanagh’s Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania examines Urania through the emotional channels and geographical attention to detail found throughout her texts. Cavanagh examines the text for the ways it incorporates contemporary discussions of science and philosophy to create a “cosmographical foundation.”219 Cherished Torment shows the connection

217 Ibid., 127-136.

218 Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 214.

219 Sheila T. Cavanagh, Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 6.

133 between contemporary understandings of the universe to romance, familial relationships, and nobility.220 While Cavanagh still understands Wroth through historical connections, she does so through scientific conversations, showing Wroth and Urania within a larger early modern sphere that takes into accounts of contemporary scientific debates and how Wroth could interpret and repackage these ideas in her romance. This foray into genre and specific conversations moves understanding of Wroth past the literal interactions she had in life and adds to these understandings networks of ideas and communities of thinkers that opens Wroth scholarship up to the history of rhetoric as well as of science and gender. As Cherished Torment interprets Urania through scientific frameworks, Mary Wroth and Shakespeare also reads Wroth’s writing through connections to writers outside of her familial sphere, pairing Wroth with other early modern authors to model the figure of the female writer with and against male counterparts, values, and assumptions.221 Most essays in the collection discuss Love’s Victory (Wroth’s drama) or From Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (Wroth’s sonnet sequence) because of generic similarities to Shakespeare’s works, and look at everything from generic conventions to the allegorical representations of early modern concepts.222 This pairing grants Wroth legitimacy by demonstrating connections between her work and the work done by the defining writer of her age. Similarly, Barbara Kiefer Lewalski’s “Revising

Genres and Claiming the Woman’s Part,” which puts Wroth’s writing in context of the

220 Ibid., 6-7.

221 Mary Wroth and Shakespeare, ed. Paul Salzman and Marion Wynne-Davies (New York: Routledge, 2015).

222 Ibid., 106.

134 genres in which it was written—a move that legitimizes her writing as much as it helps to understand it.223 Lewalski focuses on the images of love and desire in Wroth’s writing, examining the ways that women exist within these often patriarchal traditions. While these frameworks give Wroth legitimacy and think through the relationships between Wroth’s works and other thinkers of early modern England, they can also exclude writers and ideas that are less well known, creating an incomplete historical record based on legitimacy rather than true interaction and thus creating and upholding binaries of female writers and male-created genres. Despite these potential problems, this framework connects Wroth to larger conceptions of writing and thought, granting her power through her use of male forms and providing more lenses to understand Wroth as a writer, reader, and thinker in early modern England. Through traditionally male spaces and forms, the figure of Wroth gains legitimacy and modern readers are able to place her within the contexts of writers, genres, and value systems we already know. Through her use of genres, readers can use these established frameworks to better understand the reasons why specific events and characters were placed in specific forms, and how genre connects to the commentary contained within. Mary Wroth’s rhetorics of virtue, play, and choice are enacted in her deliberate use of the closet drama as the genre for her tragicomic play Love’s Victory, which creates private spaces that allow communication to be between select community members. The closet drama is a largely female tradition that consists of writing outside of publication and performance—the plays were often manuscripts meant to be read by a controlled group of people, rather than staged for public consumption or

223 Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 251-254.

135 published for anyone to purchase. While Wroth published Urania and From Pamphilia to Amphilantus, Love’s Victory remained a text meant only for the consumption and entertainment of a very small audience, and survives in manuscript form from Sidney libraries. Those who performed in and saw Love’s Victory could be tightly controlled—and in this case were most likely her family members at a sister’s wedding celebration.224 Love’s Victory’s genre meant that the play could be a space to experiment with ideas about women’s choices that could challenge the status quo while engaging with only a few consumers or players. This is quite unlike the publication of Urania, which was challenged publicly because of the way it depicted characters that many perceived as real people and events of the time.225 Though closet dramas are often understood in opposition to stage dramas because they were written to be read instead of performed in public, they were often still performed in semi- public company and discussed “public” concepts—so they still commented on the social issues of the day, even when they were not meant for all of London or even the court to consume them. Marta Straznicky argues that women’s closet dramas were written to interact with and comment on contemporary conversations in politics and philosophy.226 Straznicky continues to discuss how the Sidnean closet play circle

224 Margaret P. Hannay, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 221.

225 The most famous of which being Sir Edward Denny’s attack, calling out her use of his daughter-in-law’s story in the tale of Seralius in Urania, which is reprinted in The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Baton Rogue: Louisiana State University Press, 1983).

226 Marta Straznicky, Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550-1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2.

136 created an intellectual literary culture that discussed broad political issues, and Wroth operated within this literary sphere.227 When examining Love’s Victory from the perspective that it was meant to challenge norms for the eyes of only a select few, the character Dalina’s ability to negotiate the way others see her shows a distinct lack of conformity to social hierarchy and typical virtues. The space of the closet drama dictates who is able to participate in the telling and allow the writer or speaker to elaborate on their intent in company where the listeners are trusted. Wroth’s closet drama was able to create a safe space where a character such as Dalina, who is fickle and does not conform to typically female virtues, could control public conversation and create a reputation through her games. Wroth chooses her audience, chooses how she tells Dalina’s story, and chooses how the other women of the play and of the performance should interpret her. The form of the closet drama allows for theories of rhetoric and womanhood to be discussed and created in private, conversational spaces. Though based in fiction, the closet drama creates the conversational spaces of rhetorical potential both within the plays themselves and through the spaces they create when they were performed. Wroth’s closet drama creates a conversational space where rhetoric and play can be formed and challenged, and within the play her characters create these rhetorical, conversational spaces as well. Love’s Victory, when not focused on the characters’ pining over lost or unrequited love, is filled with short, spoken games between the shepherds and shepherdesses as they navigate their confusing feelings for one another. Like Jane Donawerth’s theory of “conversational rhetoric,” which argues that women use private conversational spaces to create and enact rhetorical theory,

227 Ibid., 14.

137 Dalina uses the “genre” of conversation to advance her own interests and the plot of the play, rather than making long speeches or even making sure that people hear her opinions: instead, she creates spaces for everyone to converse.228 These games, which range from discussing past loves to telling each others’ fortunes, have one thing in common: they are all introduced by Dalina. Dalina tries to keep the tone of the play light, even when everyone around her is upset: “Methinks we now too silent are. Let’s play/ At something while we yet have pleasing day” (II.I).229 Dalina’s choices throughout the play highlight that, unlike the others who take the love-meddling of the play seriously, Dalina is focused on fun and views love as a light-hearted endeavor. Her approach adds levity to a play that nearly ends in a double suicide, but also provides a space for communication between lovers who are otherwise constantly miscommunicating through the actions of the gods. Thomas Wilson defines the value within “delighting the hearers and stirring them to laughter” in rhetoric:

Therefore, sometimes in telling a weighty matter, they bring in some heavy tale and move them to be right sorry, whereby the hearers are more attentive. But after, when they are wearied either with the tediousness of the matter or heaviness of the report, some pleasant matter is invented both to quicken them again and also to keep them from satiety.230

228 Jane Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women's Tradition, 1600- 1900 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012).

229 Mary Wroth, “Love’s Victory,” in Early Modern Women’s Writing: An Anthology, 1560-1700, ed. Paul Salzman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 94.

230 Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric, ed. Peter E. Medine (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 164.

138 Wroth’s use of Dalina capitalizes on this balance, and she is the character who introduces the “pleasant matter” so that the rest of the play can continue without weighing down the characters or those watching and playing them. She is able to successfully mock herself, while still keeping the weightiness of the others’ experiences in the play in mind. Through Wroth’s use of genre and the games within the play itself, the genres seen in Love’s Victory create space for rhetorical play and choice. In the next section, I move discussing Wroth’s characters further, and the ways they use conversation and games to navigate sex, relationships, and gender. Specifically, I continue to examine her play Love’s Victory, and the character of Dalina within it to show how, while Dalina’s values may not reflect those of the others in the play, she is able to create a space for herself regardless through her use of language, game, and play. In the last section, understanding what it is that makes Wroth useful for us, be it her gender, her history of literacy in her family, her connections to masculine frameworks, or her deliberate use of genre, creates openings for the new ways we can read her and her characters for the rhetorical exigency they bring, arguing for themselves and for women as a whole. Wroth’s use in past scholarship and in other fields demonstrates the many ways she has already been interpreted, and shows how she as a figure and her works can be read in ways that fit current binaries and understandings—and ways that Wroth defies them. Dalina, from Love’s Victory, uses her speech and word games to define herself as a fickle lover, and she exemplifies the bad woman and the way that this woman defies punishment in Wroth’s texts.

139 Wroth’s Characters as Negotiators The final section of this chapter brings together the earlier sections on virtue created and undermined and non-binary understandings of Wroth as a writer, creator, and woman together to read the virtues created and undermined in Wroth’s closet drama, Love’s Victory. The section will engage with the ways in which Wroth wrote characters, specifically Dalina, that did not suffer for a lack of virtues, and instead were able to communicate effectively for themselves and create spaces for themselves within the value systems of others. That is, Dalina speaks for herself about women’s sexualities and the limits of what is allowed in women’s desires, in women’s emotions, and in women’s virtues.231 Dalina is granted a fair amount of agency in a play where most other characters are ruled by fate. The gods—Venus and Cupid—are responsible for much of the action and the emotions of the play, and only a few of the characters escape the will of the gods, and it is those considered outside of the more privileged arc of the love stories who are able to dodge the tragic outcomes many of the love stories in the play nearly have. The other two characters who avoid the will of the gods are men—the shepherd Rustic who has manners to match his name, and the villain, Arcas, who is found out and cast out by the end of the play. Dalina is the third,

231 Love’s Victory focuses on the love stories of a group of genteel and well-educated “shepherds.” Of the fairly large group of shepherds, the story highlights in particular the trials of Philisses, Musella, Silvesta, and Lissius. Philisses and Musella love one another but are too modest to believe that the other loves them, leading Musella to be unwillingly betrothed to Rustic. Silvesta praises the choice of chastity over love after realizing that Philisses will never love her. She vows to help Philisses and Musella achieve their love, and pledges her chaste love to Forester, who is devoted to her throughout. Lissius originally scorns love until he falls for Simeana (Philisses’s sister), and he is in turn beloved by both Simeana and the outsider Climeana. Also involved are Dalina, the fickle woman who eventually marries Rustic, and Arcas, the villain who plays on the lovers’ insecurities.

140 and she is left out because she is more comfortable flirting with men than creating a lasting bond. In other words, she just does not fit into a love story because of her own choices. Unlike characters like Pamphilia and Urania, praised for their constancy, Dalina defies this virtue and does not suffer for it. Instead, she is able to make choices about her sexuality and her body that are not often granted to women, in and outside of fictional spaces. More importantly, Dalina demonstrates reasons to read Wroth’s works for the ways she uses speech, conversation, and games, and show how female characters can demonstrate feminist rhetorical tactics for survival and to build thriving lives even in fictional spaces. Wroth’s characters are subjects who make their own choices, rather than objects for male characters to project their feelings onto, and create and enact strategies to maintain their own agency. Dalina’s use of spoken games and conversation gives her agency to justify her space in the text and her actions as an immoral character. Her word games open up roles in the play that otherwise might not exist for a character such as her, but the games also allow her to fit into the acceptable frameworks of the play that already constrict her. While Dalina initiates the games, she then often defers the choice of game to the group at large, specifically asking the men to define the outcomes. Her actions allow the women to take control of the situation for a brief period of time, even if it is only for a quick and lighthearted game, but then to act as though the men remain in charge of the main action. Thus, Dalina can act as though the conversation leads to a game naturally, and then the men are quickly folded into the power structure and allowed to direct the conversation. 232 By transferring her power, Dalina remains

232 Katherine R. Larson, “Conversational Games and the Articulation of Desire in ‘Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost’ and Mary Wroth’s ‘Love’s Victory,’ English

141 conscious of the ways that she controls conversations with the others, specifically with those who would challenge her ability to use language to open possibilities for herself rather than fitting herself into the moral structure of the play. Katherine R. Larson shows that “conversational games” are used by women to capitalize on semi-private spaces and specifically developed hierarchies of games to give women agency in courtship rituals.233 Larson demonstrates, then, that the games have separate hierarchies and rules than the typically gendered modes of speech between men and women, and Dalina, as a character that does not always fit into the hierarchies of the rest of the play, can control these rules and hierarchies because they are separate. Dalina’s games allow her to create spaces of honest speech about love and relationships not bound by the same rules as the rest of the shepherds’ lives. The ability to create games outside of a normative structure echoes other moments of language and creation from other spaces of early modern literature, and demonstrates how virtues are created and subverted through women’s use of rhetoric and play. Dalina’s reliance on verbal play in the games she sets up between the rest of the events surrounding the love-struck cast of characters parallels the rhetoric of the salon developed by Baldesar Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, which was originally printed in Italian in 1527 and was circulating in multiple languages and editions by

1619.234 Through his theory of sprezzatura, Castiglione encourages developing grace

Literary Renaissance 40, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 182. https://doi- org.udel.idm.oclc.org/10.1111/j.1475-6757.2010.01065.x.

233 Ibid., 167.

234 Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, “Baldesar Castiglione,” in The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, 2nd ed., ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg (New York: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 1979), 652.

142 and wit through light banter, and his Book of the Courtier is written in the form of the conversational game that Dalina initiates throughout the play.235 Lyn Bennett connects Wroth’s aunt Mary Sidney Herbert’s Psalms to the theory of sprezzatura, so Wroth both knew of the theory and had an example of including it in writing from her aunt and mentor.236 Dalina parallels the courtiers of Castiglione, specifically Emilia Pia, in recognizing the benefit of developing reputations and relationships through wordplay. Dalina’s games show the indifference that a courtier is supposed to develop when speaking, which contrasts oddly with the obsessive love that otherwise forms the backbone of the play. Larson describes the figure of Emilia Pia in Castiglione’s work as one who “assumes responsibility for the games,” granting women “a sanctioned space… to achieve rhetorical, political, and even sexual agency.”237 Though Dalina seems silly and lighthearted compared to the passions of those around her, she actually maintains control over courtship through her investment in the games she authorizes, giving herself authority over the small situations she creates, and through these moments, she allows the other women to develop some small agency as well. Because Dalina is able to maintain control over who hears her speech and takes on the light and unaffected tone of a courtier, she is able to communicate her

235 Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, in The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, 2nd ed., ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg (New York: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 1979), 661.

236 Lyn Bennett, Women Writing of Divinest Things: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Pembroke, Wroth, and Lanyer (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004), 10.

237 Katherine R. Larson, “Conversational Games and the Articulation of Desire in ‘Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost’ and Mary Wroth’s ‘Love’s Victory,’ English Literary Renaissance 40, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 166. https://doi- org.udel.idm.oclc.org/10.1111/j.1475-6757.2010.01065.x.

143 flirtatious past in a way that does not condemn her actions and her choices but instead make use of them for the other women in the play. Dalina is aware of the virtues that exist in her world, but she actively counters them through her games and conversations with the other women, even those who are bound by the virtues that she circumvents. To use her conversations to her own benefit, Dalina waits until she is alone with the other shepherdesses and then she instigates a game where she can list off her past dalliances with impunity. She starts a “game” where they list their experiences with men, and when the other women are reluctant to share, she takes the lead:

I can say least of all, yet I will speak. A shepherd once there was, and not the worst Of those were most esteemed, whose sleep did break With love, forsooth, of me. I found it thought I might have him at leisure, liked him not. (III.II)238 Dalina doesn’t hesitate here: her game is one that necessitates honesty and plain speech, and she demonstrates those to the other women. She uses kairos, understanding the moment between women as a time to communicate with one another about love, virtues, and finding happiness. To take advantage of the moment, she focuses on the ways she has rejected lovers, not dwelling on the shepherd mentioned but making his merits clear, a stark contrast to her indifference to him when she leaves him. Dalina seems to be taking the same approach to love that Castiglione takes to the arts: “that affectation is detrimental in this and all other things.”239 Though

238 Mary Wroth, “Love’s Victory,” in Early Modern Women’s Writing: An Anthology, 1560-1700, ed. Paul Salzman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 108.

239 Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, in The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, 2nd ed., ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg (New York: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 1979), 662.

144 Dalina eventually admits that her “nonchalance” has cost her the respect of two young men (and four men total are listed in her speech), she approaches the idea of love with a distance that the others of the play cannot adopt.240 She is not tormented or blindsided by love, as another character, Lissius, clearly is when he utters: “Love, pardon me, I know I did amiss/ When I thee scorned… let not my heart be torn/ With thus much torture” (III.II).241 Dalina’s unaffected approach to love does not come close to the torture felt by others, and she makes use of her lack of suffering to give the other women of the play space to speak about themselves and the constraints placed on them by love. She sees the virtues of love and constancy valued by the other women, and makes a place for them to communicate both about those virtues and to push back against them. Within Love’s Victory, Wroth uses the space of the closet drama to push against the categorization of women by their relationships to their lovers, creating the values of chastity and loyalty in the space and undercutting it at the same time—as Dalina, who has had many lovers, is able to escape greater censure. Indeed, Climeana, who is present during Dalina’s admission of her frivolous behavior, is told her claim on Lissius’s love is invalid because she has loved another before.242 Despite the condemnation of Climeana, however, Dalina does not apologize for her history, though she admits it may make her look bad. She is made immune to the punishment

240 Mary Wroth, “Love’s Victory,” in Early Modern Women’s Writing: An Anthology, 1560-1700, ed. Paul Salzman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 108.

241 Ibid., 112.

242 Mary Wroth, “Love’s Victory,” in Early Modern Women’s Writing: An Anthology, 1560-1700, ed. Paul Salzman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 110 (III.II).

145 of Cupid and Venus, because she is never truly in love with the men she lists. Dalina acts against her genre, creating emotional development between female characters rather than focusing on a pure love focused toward a potential husband. More than this, Dalina maintains control over her history by speaking it out loud. She claims her history for herself and does not allow the other women to use it against her, as happens to Climeana. Instead, she openly admits—in female-only company—that she has little experience with the type of love that the play is obsessed with and instead only engages in a kind of love for fun, in the unaffected style of Castiglione’s courtiers.243 Her calm control over how her story is received, and her control over who hears it, shows her mastery over her history and control in who is able to judge her for it. Dalina is not a silly woman, though she does present herself as such; her speech plays up the lightness of her actions, but under the surface, she shows that she acts in her own interest. Dalina’s direct speech and unaffected manner allows her to take responsibility for a type of female behavior that goes against the actions and values of the rest of the women in the play, and as such she proves that women can behave in non-typical ways and not be punished for such choices. She highlights her right to choose which man she wishes to love, and shows that she gets to determine her own relationships. She makes herself the master of her own romantic fate, rather than being played by the gods or men, as is the fate of nearly every other lover in the play. Her speech and her choices allow her to escape the pressures of emotion and romance for women, and to instead find another option besides being a lover or a spurned woman—she ends up married by her own choice. While Urania’s Towers hold

243 Castiglione’s development of his views on love is more complex than this, but I argue here that Dalina uses sprezzatura in her approach to love, rather than mirroring Castiglione’s discussion of love itself.

146 women up to chastity and perfect love, even when acknowledging that they must fail, Dalina’s voice allows for choice rather than compliance and undercuts the virtues that every other woman attempts to uphold even through near-fatal consequences. Dalina unites the concepts of sprezzatura and conversational games to allow for a space of female communication that gives women the right to navigate their own relationships and to create their own value systems through rhetoric when the ones governing their societies would condemn them. Her games connect rhetorical speech to the actions of choosing to love on her own terms. Donawerth’s “conversational rhetoric,” that women develop an alternate form of rhetorical theory that centers on the conversation rather than an oratorical display, allows semi-private performances to be a place for rhetorical consideration.244 Dalina’s rhetorical considerations open up a space of choices for women who are used to their love lives being predetermined, either by the gods or by their families.245 Dalina uses these conversational spaces to focus on her own feelings rather than any other determinant for a relationship. When telling the other women about her past loves, she says of her first love that she “liked him not,” that her second choice, a farmer, “bought not his lot/ for love,” and she thought her two youths “I very well could love,” even though she decides against them.246 She demonstrates that she can marry for her own choice, and not for another’s. Her method of speaking, of highlighting her history to a select audience of

244 Jane Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women's Tradition, 1600-1900 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012).

245 Indeed, Musella’s plotline focuses on her mother wanting to marry her to Rustic, despite her daughter’s protests.

246 Mary Wroth, “Love’s Victory,” in Early Modern Women’s Writing: An Anthology, 1560-1700, ed. Paul Salzman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 108.

147 women, also demonstrates her method of choosing a lover. Dalina uses her games to create choice, and her chosen rhetoric is never corrupted by her flirtatious history nor the outside control of Venus and Cupid, who command the rest of the play. Her tactics make spaces of play in a serious discussion of love, and make moments of choice for women who feel constantly compelled to give into the demands of those around them. Wroth not only gives voice to Dalina as a woman who can negotiate her own life, but her conversational rhetoric and game playing allows Dalina to offer advice to her peers in her carefully-crafted conversational spaces, even when her virtues do not line up with and could even threaten theirs. Dalina maintains friendships and connections through her games, and is not punished for behavior that could be seen as off-putting when coming from an early modern woman. She gives advice about men which is tailored for her more chaste friends:

Let them alone, and they will seek and sue, But yield to them and they’ll with scorn pursue. Hold awhile off, they’ll kneel, nay, follow, you, And vow and swear. Yet all their oaths untrue! … And let them cry, there is no evil done, They gain but that which you might else have won. (III.II)247 Dalina wants the women to play games with the men in love, to “strangely look” so that the men cry for “pity.” She argues that men’s oaths are “untrue,” so the women can’t trust them with their “smiles.” Unlike the other women of the play, she is not taken in by the honesty of men, but instead claims they play games just as she encourages the women to do. Simeana, hearing this, questions: “Why, but now you said/ Your folly had your loves and good betrayed/ And that heareafter you would

247 Ibid., 111.

148 wiser be.” (III.II)248 Because Dalina had recently claimed that she would tie herself to a man rather than play games, Simeana expects her advice for the other women to mirror her take away for herself. However, Dalina counters this interpretation: “I have my fortunes lost, yours do begin,/ And to cross those could be no greater sin.” (III.II)249 Dalina claims that she has already ruined her reputation, and instead wants to help the others’ preserve theirs. Dalina proves that her rhetorical games and conversations are adaptable. She first demonstrates her own ability to control her speech and her love life, and then demonstrates that this type of control is not “one size fits all” but instead can be changed depending on the needs of the woman using it. She wants the women to advocate for themselves and choose their lovers, rather than to get played by men or allow men to choose for them. She allows for women to take on the virtues defined for them, but does not make that their only option. Dalina uses the moments where she plays the fool to demonstrate an alternative view of love and marriage and to create a space where women can share experiences and advice with one another—not free of judgment, but within a guarded space where they are the only ones having the conversation, and free to express themselves in a larger world where their emotions are not their own to control. While Dalina is often seen as a figure of “base” love, outside of the main characters whose relationships are built on chastity and loyalty, she is still afforded space in Love’s Victory to craft her own identity and choose her own fate. Thus, she exemplifies the ways that Wroth creates and undercuts women’s moralities in her works, and how we mirror these actions as we create figures of Wroth to understand

248 Ibid.

249 Ibid., 112.

149 her today. The character of Dalina gives an option for women reading Wroth’s work today—the chance to opt out. Instead of reading women as romantic objects, doomed to pine for a man until he notices her, Dalina is a woman who creates female conversation and chooses to not allow love to be the center of her universe. A strange, simple character from the past can become a feminist option to see women as more complex than the love stories they inhabit in much of literature, and Dalina’s voice is a rhetorical choice for dialogue and desire for women who see female characters as limiting. Wroth, a noblewoman with literary connections, chose to publish or to keep private her writings and used her characters to show both the virtues that are created by women’s speech, writing, and games—and to undermine them using the same tactics. Wroth’s genres and characters work together to create demonstrations of what conversation and games can be for women finding their place in a world where love is one of their most important markers of femininity and humanity. Wroth creates—and then undermines—values and virtues tailored specifically for women. In this chapter, I have paired Dalina and the virtues she undermines through her verbal games and choices with a discussion of the ways that scholars talk about Wroth in scholarship today. Like her characters, Wroth’s writing shows the values she cares to develop, and the ways she is represented shows what values read into her as modern interpreters use her writing for our own complex understanding of women’s writing. Wroth’s writing, writing about Wroth, and her characters’ speech and writing show how we perceive writing as a tactic and how it creates choices for women who otherwise seem limited in their lives and their values.

150 Chapter 5

VARIED SPEECH, CHANGEABLE BODIES, AND MARGARET CAVENDISH’S QUEER RHETORICAL LEGACIES

Margaret Cavendish is easily the most prolific writer of the women included in this dissertation. While the English Civil War and her family’s devotion to monarchy disrupted Cavendish’s early life, her marriage to William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, and the restoration of the Stuart line brought Margaret back to a place of comfort, where she could write plays, poems, essays, letters, and stories and publish them with perhaps some backlash but little disruption to her life. However, The Story of a New World, Called the Blazing World, arguably her most popular work, introduces Margaret Cavendish better than I can. The book quite literally presents her to her audience, as she writes herself into the text as the character “The Duchess of Newcastle.” The Duchess, an advisor handpicked by the text’s protagonist, the Empress, to help write a Cabbala to better understand the world is presented openly as Cavendish, with the same title and with references to specific details in her life. The Duchess, then, is clearly Cavendish, and she is also an unapologetically ambitious character. She calls for her own legacy within the Blazing World’s larger universe: “Well, said the Duchess, setting aside this dispute, my ambition is, that I would fain be as you are, that is, an Empress of a world, and I shall never be at quiet until I be

151 one.”250 Cavendish’s avatar demands to rule a world, and this remark is met not with derision or contempt but with full support, and an immediate call to find a world that needs the Duchess. While this kind of arrogance and desire is rarely if ever rewarded for women, within the bounds of Blazing World Cavendish dreams up a new world for herself to rule, creating a place in her head that becomes the text Blazing World. Through her ambition, Cavendish builds a legacy for herself in her text—an explicit call to be remembered not just for writing, but for the very desires to be in charge and to be immortalized that her avatar depicts. Cavendish’s choice to use her texts to document her ambition, desire for power, and quest to be remembered shows the importance of building a reputation and being remembered for her mind to Cavendish’s works. She uses her own avatar to call for more power than the Empress has, a character who is promptly worshipped and given free reign in the Blazing World as soon as she arrives. This call—not just the consolidation of power but the unabashed desire for it—shows the ways that Cavendish asks to be remembered, not just as someone with access to power but as someone who wants it and is able to ask for it both in and with her writing. Anne M. Thell discusses Cavendish’s choice to write herself into her text by claiming that her “materialist understanding of intellectual endeavor[s]” means that “she is physically embodied in her texts and again in our minds each time we read them.”251 Thell

250 Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, in The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 184.

251 Anne M. Thell, “‘Lady Phoenix’: Margaret Cavendish and the Poetics of Palingenesis,” Early Modern Women 11, no. 1 (Fall 2016), 129. https://doi.org/10.1353/emw.2016.0047.

152 explains that Cavendish’s belief that thoughts are material creates a physical avatar of herself in the minds of those who read the text after her.252 Through Cavendish’s materialism and inclusion of her self, readers see Margaret Cavendish actively building her own legacy through her work and in her work, building herself a world in which she is the creator and the arbiter and will continue to be so to all those who read her words after her. Cavendish uses her writing and manifestations of her physical self to build a lasting legacy in the minds of her readers. In this chapter, I examine the ways that Cavendish builds this legacy through rhetorical tactics and queer understandings of bodies and relationships. She uses categorization, play, naming, and speech as well as non-normative and queer social bonds and genders to build a legacy of intellectualism and virtue, demonstrating the precise ways she wants to be remembered and the importance of remembrance to her female characters—both those who are stand-ins for herself, and those who have different lives, trajectories, and desires. In this brief but illuminating introduction to Cavendish, her desire to be remembered in and through her works is brought front and center. In this chapter, I invoke the concept of creating a legacy—a public, lasting reputation for actions or virtues actively sought out by those wishing to be remembered. The characters in

Blazing World and Assaulted and Pursued Chastity establish themselves as intellectuals through their use of writing and speech in their texts, and their deliberate use of rhetoric in the world of their stories builds them lasting reputations as smart, virtuous women. While Elizabeth I, Elizabeth Cary, and Mary Wroth all use their

252 Ibid., 128-136.

153 writing and their characters’ use of rhetoric and speech in ways that depict women as complex actors in their own lives, Cavendish’s primary concern is the lasting intellectual futurity of her characters, and through them, herself. Because of her focus on intellectual futures, her characters’ choices often carry them past the accepted norm for virtuous actions in women. They are allowed to bypass these accepted conventions and enter markedly queer spaces because their legacies are not built on propriety or norms, but on their own articulation of their desires through speech, writing, and rhetorical choices. By creating positive legacies for thinking women, Cavendish creates a place for herself inside these worlds and, hopefully, in the world in which they are published. While this chapter interrogates the ways that Cavendish shapes her own legacy and those of the characters in her works, her modern legacy is tainted by the conflict between her personal ideals and the accepted modern frameworks of feminist ideology. In scholarship about her, Cavendish is often portrayed as a conflicted feminist figure; like Elizabeth I, Elizabeth Cary, and Mary Wroth she relied on some combination of exceptionalism, wealth, and status to be able to compose. Cavendish, in particular, is notorious in modern scholarship for her devotion to nobility and her performative humility for being a woman, demonstrating a potential contempt for women as a whole and a lack of feminist ideals. Indeed, Rosemary Kegl explores this by asking: “how we should evaluate a feminist agenda which is advanced by a seventeenth-century woman writer who was also an aristocrat, a royalist, and a notorious rack-renter?”253 However, these ideas are not, perhaps, as difficult to

253 Rosemary Kegl, “‘The World I Have Made’: Margaret Cavendish, Feminism, and the Blazing-World,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge:

154 reconcile as previously considered. Take, for example, the work of Patricia Pender, who claims that the devaluation of the female sex seen in the inscriptions of works (such as the “To the Readers” at the beginning of Cavendish’s The World’s Olio and Blazing World) work within a larger structure of modesty in writing of both men and women, rather than a denial of their gender as such.254 Assessments such as Pender’s reexamines the work of women in light of their participation in a larger culture of writing, and complicates the simple beliefs that women acting as though they do not support other women in some scenarios does not mean that they truly believe in their own inferiority as a gender, nor that their works are not useful to us in specific modern feminist frameworks even if they espouse some beliefs we wish to leave behind. Like many who take up Cavendish, I work to find the parts of her writing that still resonate with feminist readers today while not condoning the elitist and exclusionary world views that often come with reading her words. This section continues a complication of Cavendish’s traditional beliefs, such as her belief in nobility, and combines them with the ways she turns these conventions on their head. This is not to deny that some of Cavendish’s beliefs, even in context, were elitist and, at times, racist, but instead to understand how and why much of Cavendish’s work still feels significant in its promoting of women’s writing. I thus want to frame my presentist reading of Cavendish correctly: I work to evaluate what

Cavendish means for a present feminist, regardless of whether or not her choices conform to the ideals now understood as feminist. Rachel Warburton positions her

Cambridge University Press, 1996), 120-121.

254 Patricia Pender, Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2012), 10-11.

155 discussions of queerness in Margaret Cavendish’s works as “a deliberate anachronism,” reading across time to understand the ways that her texts interact with Lee Edelman’s.255 Working with both Pender and Warburton’s frameworks, this chapter does not assess whether Cavendish meets current or former markers of feminism, but instead works to understand what current feminist researchers can do with and how we can apply a feminist reading of Cavendish. Feminist readings of Cavendish’s work are conflicted because of her elitist worldviews, and history of rhetoric readings of her works are complicated by her gender and the wide expanse of genres she wrote in and experimented with. Nevertheless, these complex examinations provide a basis for Cavendish’s works to be read as persuasive and belonging in part to an early modern rhetorical landscape. Cavendish is mentioned in George A. Kennedy’s Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient and Modern Times, a foundational text detailing the general shape of rhetoric through history. While Cavendish’s name comes up in Kennedy’s text, it is in a section devoted to women authors siloed off from the larger discussion of Neoclassical Rhetoric, included but only on the margins.256 Her most notable mentions in rhetoric are in works on feminist rhetoric, such as in Jane Donawerth’s Conversational Rhetoric, which argues that women writers developed

255 Rachel Warburton, “‘A Woman hath no… Reason to desire Children for her Own Sake’: Margaret Cavendish Reads Lee Edelman,” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 27, no. 3 (2016): 238. https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2016.1207276.

256 George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 263.

156 rhetorical theories not about oration, as did men, but about the art of conversation.257 Donawerth uses Cavendish’s World’s Olio as an example of her contribution to this theory, demonstrating how Cavendish created theories that rely on response, debate, and discussion rather than the speaker-audience relationship that oratory requires.258 Similarly, Early Modern Women in Conversation, Katherine R. Larson engages with several of Cavendish’s works, fictional and philosophical alike, in order to demonstrate the use of conversation as a genre in women’s writing.259 Larson looks at the World’s Olio, as well as Blazing World, Philosophical Letters, and Observations on Natural Philosophy, examining Cavendish as a writer as well as her figure in a larger female conversation about writing. Both of these scholars demonstrate the importance of conversation for women to use and theorize about rhetoric, connecting women’s private roles with a more subtle rhetorical banter that allows women to persuade without declaiming publicly. Demonstrating the ways that Cavendish balances rhetorical experimentation with the constraints on women, these texts provide a framework for modern readers to understand Cavendish’s use of rhetorical theory in her works and how she creates her legacy through her use of language. Cavendish’s inclusion in feminist and history of rhetoric canons helps to build a foundation for understanding how her legacy is built today, and how her works contribute to this legacy. Using these texts, Cavendish’s legacy is created through the

257 Jane Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women's Tradition, 1600-1900 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012).

258 Ibid., 29-33.

259 Larson, Katherine R. Early Modern Women in Conversation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 138-165.

157 tactics she uses in her fiction: to focus on rhetoric, in the speech and writing capabilities of her protagonists; to create her own systems of naming and categorization that defy the scientific and social order originally created; and to focus her works on the close relationships between women, even when relationships with or between men are potentially more strategically advantageous. Reading her works and the conversations that have come out of her works today creates a modern legacy of the queer and rhetorical potential that Cavendish’s choices have.

Blazing Worlds and Female Bonds This section examines Blazing World for the ways it uses conversation, bonds between characters, and the work of categorization and explanation done by the characters in the text to create a legacy of intellectualism for the Empress and Duchess alike. Blazing World’s mix of naked ambition, scientific theory, and women’s relationships uses the acts of writing and sharing and discarding bodies to model the intellectual and rhetorical prowess of the Empress and Duchess, as well as the way Cavendish wants herself and her story remembered. Blazing World tells the story of a Lady, who through happenstance and marriage becomes the Empress of a world adjacent to her own. The Empress specifies immediately how she wants to use this newly acquired power: to understand her new world, to categorize her new information, and to change society and test hypotheses on why the world is organized in its current manner. This section examines the intellectualism and personal connections that the Empress and the Duchess in Blazing World prefer over any kind of determined future, and how the text creates a legacy of a life of the mind often not available for women but promoted by Cavendish anyway. Blazing World develops

158 these legacies of intellectualism for its female characters, building deeply personal worlds that allow for rhetorical play. I explore the Empress’s specific, curious intellectualism using queer theory’s death drive, which examines the ways in which queer lives work against a cultural drive to a reproductive future.260 Like Warburton’s reading of Cavendish with Edelman, I examine Cavendish’s work for the ways that it builds a future not predicated on having children but instead on conversation and written creation.261 While Warburton reads Cavendish’s Sociable Letters for the ways they advocate for a “writerly futurism,” I look to the characters in Blazing World as they create and destroy categories, rules, and whole worlds, caring more about collaborative intellectual pursuits than any sort of productive or reproductive future.262 Examining the Empress’s queer relationship with the Duchess, in particular, and their inclinations to intellectualism rather than reproduction, I examine the characters in The Blazing World for their desire to create a legacy through learning, categorization, and ruling, all depicted through explicit references to writing and rhetoric, rather than through a reproductive future created by gendered bodies. As Edelman views queer relationships as death to an organized society predicated on reproduction, Cavendish promotes

260 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), and Jack Halberstam, “The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies,” Graduate Journal of Social Science 5, no. 2, (2008): 140-156. http://gjss.org/content/anti-social-turn-queer-studies.

261 Rachel Warburton, “‘A Woman hath no… Reason to desire Children for her Own Sake’: Margaret Cavendish Reads Lee Edelman,” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 27, no. 3 (2016): 234-251. https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2016.1207276.

262 Ibid., 238.

159 personal relationships, queer female bonds, body sharing, non-monogamy, and intellectual pursuits for her characters that would otherwise build legacies and societies through their production of offspring. The Empress’s intellectual futurity is built through her conversations and categorizations, but she is first able to create a legacy of the mind because of her access to privileged spaces through her innate virtues. Thus, her later choices are first justified because of her internal goodness:

No sooner was the Lady brought before the Emperor, but he conceived her to be some goddess, and offered to worship her; which she refused, telling him, (for by that time she had pretty well learned their language) that although she came out of another world, yet was she but a mortal; at which the Emperor rejoicing, made her his wife, and gave her an absolute power to rule and govern all that world as she pleased.263

The Lady’s qualifications for becoming Empress are immediately evident, starting with the “the light of her beauty, the heat of her youth” that makes her automatically capable to become some sort of deity in the eyes of the Blazing World denizens.264 The Emperor immediately conceives of her as a being above him, and only her mortality convinces him otherwise. Her virtues are on display and make the Emperor figuratively fall to his knees. In addition, her quickly-acquired linguistic abilities are a clear marker of her intellectual prowess, and act as one of the virtues that gains her a husband and a land to rule over. Even the Empress’s clothes make the claim for her

263 Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, in The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 132.

264 Ibid.

160 that she “was ready to assault those that proved her enemies.”265 The Lady is immediately marked as better than those in the Blazing World, set apart and able to rule and thus destined for legacies greater than those who make up typical society. Her superiority may or may not be borne out by the rest of the text, but it certainly benefits her, as her virtues allow the Lady to intercede in the workings of the Blazing World to better understand the way it works. This specific type of exceptionalism rests on monarchy, but it does not draw its power from it—instead the Empress is exceptional because of her own internal traits, which she makes manifest through her connections with others in the Blazing World, with the spirits that instruct her, and with the Duchess. It also allows her to make connections with others that she would never be able to meet otherwise. While her marriage to the Emperor gives her the ability to create change in the Blazing World that otherwise would be denied to an outsider and a woman, a way to set her apart as the lynchpin and creator of the world, it is her connection to the Duchess that gives her a peer, a friend, and a lover to create intellectual bonds and better understand her conditions. While the Empress’s marriage gives her full range to explore and change the Blazing World without factoring much into the rest of the narrative, the Empress’s bond with the Duchess is both emotionally and intellectually deep and connected to both her virtues and her desire to understand the wider world she now controls. More than being included as an avatar of Cavendish, the Duchess is called upon in the text for her knowledge, connecting her to the Empress’s intellectual goals: “But […] there’s a lady, the Duchess of Newcastle, which although she is not one of the most

265 Ibid., 133.

161 learned, eloquent, witty and ingenious, yet she is a plain and rational writer, for the principle of her writing, is sense and reason, and she will without question, be ready to do you all the service she can.”266 Though compared to the intellectual might of Aristotle and his ilk listed before her, the Duchess is framed as less of a heavy hitter, she is praised for the art of her writing and considered a fitting companion for someone as divine as the Empress. Through their devotion to writing, the Duchess and Empress quickly form a connection based on their shared intellectual plans and their propensity for artful language, showing a legacy built from and steeped in rhetorical deftness. The Empress defines her goals through writing and categorizing, specifically though the work of creating her Cabbala. Her bond with the Duchess is built on this shared intellectual desire, as the Duchess is a writer brought up in the next breath after Aristotle. Their connection is based on intellectual goals grounded in their rhetorical skills—to understand the underlying rules that govern the new place, and use the kairos of their positions to better understand their world. The connection between the Empress and the Duchess is based on their desire to write together, to create a lasting record of the Blazing World through the Empress’s Cabbala influenced by the Duchess’s experience and input. Whether or not the Cabbala is ever completed within the pages of Blazing World, the work put into it is evident in the Empress’s questioning her people and calling on the spirits, conversations meant to deepen her understanding and pave the way for the creation of her Cabbala. There is a focus on discussion in the Empress’s creation, an understanding borne of asking, viewing, and writing down. As soon as the Duchess is

266 Ibid., 181.

162 summoned, the conversation about what kind of Cabbala they will write together commences. Like Donawerth and Larson’s theories about conversational rhetoric, these decisions about writing are made through a discussion between the two women: “Then I pray, said the Empress, let me know your counsel in this case. The Duchess answered, if your Majesty will be pleased to harken to my advice, I would desire your to let that work alone, for it will be of no advantage either to you, or your people.”267 Despite the fact that her desire to write a “Jews’ Cabbala” is the reason the Empress summons the Duchess in the first place, she lets this desire go quickly at the advice of the Duchess, whose opinion she trusts. They work together to decide what to write and how to write it, modeling a collaborative brainstorming and writing process that modifies how the Empress thinks about the world around her and how she wishes to record the world around her. They conclude to change the type of Cabbala that the Empress writes: “If your Majesty were resolved to make a Cabbala, I would advise you, rather to make a poetical or romancical Cabbala, wherein you can use metaphors, allegories, similitudes, etc. and interpret them as you please. With that the Empress thanked the Duchess, and embracing her soul, told her she would take her counsel.”268 Their conversation leads to the Empress making the best choice for her Cabbala, one that focuses on the ways that she can manipulate language, rather than one focused on religion, morality, or philosophy. The Duchess advises the Empress that way the text is written is more important than what it contains. More than this, though, the rhetorical creation here is a push and pull between learned individuals who want to

267 Ibid., 182.

268 Ibid., 183.

163 record the way the world works. The Duchess and the Empress’s relationship is founded on their exchange of ideas and devotion to conversation and writing. Both have virtues grounded in language, and they use them to create together—to develop a written record of the Empress’s understanding of the world. The Empress focuses on a rhetorical creation that centers understanding, collaboration, and questioning, and most importantly leaves a record of her understandings. The connection between the Duchess and the Empress is built on writing and the exploration of ideas, building a legacy for both and, because of this focus, subverts the bonds expected from women. Valerie Traub explores the place of friendship for women, theorizing how important female-female bonds were in the 16th and 17th centuries beyond women’s connections to their families. More specifically, she examines the place of friendship in queer female desire, she finds spaces for queer acts in women’s relationships with one another. 269 Her conclusions are supported by the Empress’s observation not long after the Duchess was suggested as her writing companion: “This lady then, said the Empress, will I choose for my scribe, neither will the Emperor have reason to be jealous, she being one of my own sex. In truth, said the spirit, husbands have reason to be jealous of platonic lovers, for they are very dangerous, as being not only very intimate and close, but subtle and insinuating.”270

269 Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); see also Harriette Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics, 1550-1714 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

270 Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, in The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 181.

164 The Empress is warned that her bonds with the Duchess are in fact dangerous to her marriage and the Duchess’s, but calls for the Duchess to be her platonic lover anyway because writing is deemed more important than protecting her husband from jealousy. While the Empress is more than willing to take the risk of destabilizing her family, noble women of the early modern period were expected to make careers out of maintaining the reputations of their husbands and children.271 The Empress and Duchess opt out of this consciously, choosing their friendship and intellectual pursuits over the idea of children or even managing the subjects’ impressions of the Emperor and Empress’s bond. Though the Duchess does bring up her husband’s reputation later in the text, the two women form the strongest connection with one another, based on their own love of learning. They reject a familial legacy to instead make a bond through and a legacy from through their chosen intellectual pursuits, using their personal desires to guide them. This bond leads to a connection with the Duchess’s husband and work to reform his reputation, but it is the connection between women that allows this to happen, rather than the marital bond. The Duchess’s introduction in the text, through her recommendation to write the Empress’s Cabbala, defines the bond between the two women as not just intellectual and queer but also spiritual, literally so, in no small part because the

Duchess is not corporeal when she meets the Empress. The Duchess is unusual in that, like the Empress, she does not originate in the Blazing World, but unlike the Empress, she is from England—a real world rather than the many fictionalized ones that otherwise make up the text. Instead of a physical connection between the Blazing

271 Barbara J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 1450-1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 8-9.

165 World and Earth, however, like the connected poles that the Empress originally passed through to get to the Blazing World, the Duchess comes to the Blazing World through a spiritual form that she uses to share bodies with the Empress. A bond originally created though a desire to understand and categorize, the connection between the Duchess and Empress transcends worlds and even bodily forms to connect the women soul-to-soul. This connection, one of minds and souls, conveniently leaves out the body so that the Empress and the Duchess can remain “platonic lovers.” Without bodies, the women are allowed to desire one another, as Rosemary Kegl elaborates upon:

In the logic of Cavendish’s text, the repeatedly emphasized physical barrier between the Blazing World and that of Cavendish precludes the possibility of physical contact between women and thus allows for the continued representation of the mobility of their desire—including their desire for one another. The relationship between Cavendish and the Lady is by definition “immaterial,” in the sense that it is not experienced as a threat to the women’s conjugal contracts and thus is not experienced as relevant.272

The desire present between the two women exists, but it is rendered conveniently acceptable by the lack of bodies that they could use to act upon their desire. It is only the physical dividers that separate their worlds that prevent a sexual relationship from forming between the Duchess and the Empress, despite their marriages. The lack of materiality in the bodies and the stark materiality of the boundary between the bodies keeps this desire from manifesting in a way that could be seen as dangerous to the

272 Rosemary Kegl, “‘The World I Have Made’: Margaret Cavendish, Feminism, and the Blazing-World,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 134.

166 other relationships in their lives. While the lack of bodies seems to preclude sexual contact, it certainly does not preclude a desire for sexual contact. The women are connected to one another in a relevant way, but instead of validating this bond through sexual activity or a joining of bodies, they are joined through conversation and a shared intellectual goal: to understand and restructure the Blazing World. Thus a shared rhetorical plan—to understand and reorder, to focus on language and to argue for change if it is perceived necessary—is used to justify and create the bond between women, creating a queer relationship formed in what seems to be a roundabout way: through minds and souls, rather than bodies. With a shared project, bodies are rendered unnecessary for the connection that the Duchess and Empress create. These characters, whose love for one another is represented in their minds and souls rather than their bodies, are able to transcend the demands on their bodies as women—particularly reproductive demands, asking them to create a legacy with offspring rather than with writing. Adrienne Rich calls heterosexuality a “political institution” more so than a choice or sexual preference.273 The political institution of heterosexuality focuses on creating bonds between families using marriage and children, building a future through heterosexual pairings. Rich documents the findings of Smith-Rosenberg, who claims that women in the 18th and 19th centuries were more

“emotionally important” to women than men were.274 While Cavendish came before these time periods, her exploration of female bonds bears this out by paying next to no

273 Adrienne Cecil Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1980),” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 3, (Autumn 2003): 17. doi:10.1353/jowh.2003.0079. Emphasis in original.

274 Ibid., 16.

167 attention to the Emperor and focusing on the connection between the Duchess and Empress instead. Moreover, Cavendish’s project renders the institution of heterosexuality unnecessary, because legacies are borne of intellectual rather than genetic or familial goals. Rhetoric and desire transcend a lack of form, because unlike a reproductive futurity, an intellectual legacy does not require physical connection— they build their legacies through their conversations with one another and their plans for written documentation, not through a connection between bodies. Bodies such as the Duchess’s and the Empress’s come with heteronormative expectations, so by disregarding bodies completely, Cavendish allows her characters to have queer desires, and to work in queer ways, without being seen as actively working against the status quo. The Duchess and the Empress are both married, but they choose a potentially politically dangerous platonic love for each other over respecting the bonds they have with their spouses. They focus on each other, and on rhetorical creation, over the reproductive futures their heterosexual relationships could create. Through their queer acts, they are able to define their own version of their futures and legacies. While the bond between the Duchess and the Empress is created through their shared intellectual goals, Blazing World explores time and again the love they share for one another. Their affection, coupled with their unconventional ways of sharing space together, hint at the physical act of sex through their minds and souls merging, if not their bodies. Even when new characters are introduced or new locations are explored, the connection between their souls is emphasized through the ways that souls can travel. When the Duchess introduces her platonic lover to her husband, she does this through body-sharing:

And then the Duke had three souls in one body; and had there been but some such souls more, the Duke would have been like the Grand

168 Signior in his seraglio, only it would have been a platonic seraglio. But the Duke’s soul being wise, honest, witty, complaisant and noble, afforded such delight and pleasure to the Empress’s soul by her conversation, that these two souls became enamoured of each other; which the Duchess’s soul perceiving, grew jealous at first, but then considering that no adultery could be committed amongst Platonic lovers, and that Platonism was divine, being derived from the divine Plato, cast forth of her mind that idea of jealousy. Then the conversation of these three souls was so pleasant, that it cannot be expressed.275

The women join with the Duchess’s husband in one body, allowing three people to take up the body of one. Cavendish describes this body-sharing through explicitly sexual language, using the term “seraglio” to metaphorically define the connection between souls and to poke fun at the arrangement of three people in one vessel. The connection between their souls within this body is strong enough to inspire negative feelings before the concept of Platonic love is used to dispel a jealousy hinting at physical connection. While the body in question is simply being used as a container, the sexual nature of fitting multiple people into one body does not pass by unremarked. Instead, it is used to show the level of intellectual, virtuous, and spiritual connection shared by those within the body in question—one that is close enough to be sexual, minus the physicality necessary for sexual actions. Michel de Foucault’s The History of Sexuality details the connection between the soul and sex, in his case examining the ways that the soul can be ordered to create the most fortuitous sexual experience.276 For Foucault, regulating the soul is the key to understanding the body’s

275 Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, in The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 194-195.

276 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 133.

169 acts, and properly controlling the sexual act.277 Cavendish also explores the connection between the body and the soul here, but for her, the body is merely a vessel for the soul, necessary for communication but unnecessary for creating the bond between souls as anything but a storage container. Cavendish’s discussion of souls helps to clarify her metaphysical understandings of the world, but modern readers can work through her connection between souls and sexualities using Foucault as a framework. Regulating the soul is still the main goal, for both Cavendish and Foucault, but because the body is not necessary for Cavendish’s views of generation, creation, and desire, the legacy that can come from such bonds is purely of the mind and soul. Cavendish links the body and the soul, but views the body as more of a vessel for communication between minds and souls rather than a necessity, for connection, reproduction, or legacy. The act of sharing bodies is described as sexual, but the desire fostered between the souls within the body is created through rhetoric—in this instance, through conversation—as the main point of contact. The point of sharing bodies is nearly the same as the point of reproduction, as both work to create futurity for those engaged in the act. To make conversation is to generate bonded intellectual goals between the joined souls. The act of conversing, of creating a site of developing rhetoric, is the main purpose of sharing a body—a queer act for a rhetorical goal, or a rhetorical act for a queer legacy. Donawerth’s theory of conversational rhetoric argues that women from the Renaissance to the 19th century used conversation, a non-

277 Ibid.

170 confrontational form of rhetorical performance, as a strategy to compose.278 Cavendish demonstrates this theory through her portrayal of conversation shown when they occupy the Duke’s body: her characters learn from one another in conversation between souls, using their sexual sharing of space and their Platonic bonds to create rhetorical theory. The legacies left by these characters are not physically manifested within Blazing World—nothing is finally written, no breath is exchanged conversing because they communicate soul-to-soul, and no relationships are consummated sexually. Instead, it is the text itself that creates a legacy for these fictional characters, and opens up possibilities for those who read of them. The theories that the characters create through their exchange of rhetoric and intellectual pursuits are those of fluid understandings of the world, a stark contrast to some of the strict conceptions promoted by male intellectuals during Cavendish’s lifetime. Anna Battigelli shows Cavendish’s deliberate move against the experimentalism promoted by Hobbes, the Royal Society, and Hooke (to name a few that Cavendish’s work answered directly) in Blazing World. Battigelli demonstrates that Cavendish promoted a theory of rationalism in her work:

Unlike the experimentalists, who devoted themselves to ‘other worlds’ [in this case, Hooke exploring tiny worlds with a microscope] without discovering an ‘Art that would carry them into these Celestial worlds,’ Cavendish presents herself as being in possession of such an art… Against Hooke’s inductive experimentalism, Cavendish juxtaposes rationalism, or what she calls “an Arguing of the mind,” as an alternative approach to knowing the world.279

278 Jane Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women's Tradition, 1600- 1900 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012).

279 Anna Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 96.

171 To resist the mechanistic ways in which those around her understood the world, Cavendish turns inward to create her theories, relying on conversation to create theories rather than an outside world that she cannot access without scientific tools. Cavendish moves around the boundaries that experimentalism creates, in that she ultimately creates a more fluid worldview that cannot be easily understood by observation. She also creates a very personal worldview: one that is dependent on the mind of the one understanding it. Cavendish locates virtue within the body, making the world flexible but the virtues of the self innate. The Blazing World and the beings within it retain their virtues but defy observation in order to stress a metaphysics of hybridity, of fluidity, of subversion. Bodies can hold no souls or three; souls can be described as sexual or Platonic; bodies can be intimately tied to the souls that come from them or they can completely abandon these bodies. Cavendish’s lack of rigid experimentalism opens her world up to fluid definitions of bodies and boundaries— fluid in speech, in categorization, and in material, and open to persuasion and argumentation to change the fabric of society. Though Cavendish’s discussion of soul-sharing helps to compose her metaphysics of the boundaries of souls, the actions that the souls take once they share a body acts against the composition of any future. Her legacy is one of intellectualism, which works against a familial future centered on reproduction. Her soul-sharing is sexual but does not complete a sexual act that can lead to reproduction, and thus her characters, though they help establish and then dismantle her categorization of souls and bodies, do not work to create or reproduce. Instead, their relationship actively works against the status quo. Lee Edelman describes this un-work as the queer death drive: “The ups and downs of political fortune may measure the social order’s pulse,

172 but queerness, by contrast, figures, outside and beyond its political symptoms, the place of the social order’s death drive: a place, to be sure, of abjection expressed in the stigma, sometimes fatal, that follows from reading that figure literally.”280 This lack of future in Blazing World undercuts a simple reading, a futurity for the characters or their politicized actions, but instead steers the work toward a more destructive conclusion. In particular, the actions of the souls in the body show, not a progression to a greater understanding, but instead a development of their own camaraderie that does not demonstrate any kind of political future: “the Duke’s soul entertained the Empress’s soul with scenes, songs, music, witty discourses, pleasant recreations, and all kinds of harmless sports.”281 Once the souls are together, they develop the bonds between each other but do not advance any of Cavendish’s utopian political or scientific goals—instead, they pass the time on “harmless sports.” Edelman identifies these “harmless sports,” and the kind of love that can, by definition, not result in “adultery” or reproduction, as the acts that go against a political agenda: “If, however, there is no baby and, in consequence, no future, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organization, collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself.”282 Edelman juxtaposed against the un-work of the souls

280 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 3. Emphasis in original.

281 Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, in The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 195.

282 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 13. Emphasis in original.

173 shows how the rhetoric in this text is positioned against the kinds of generative creation that reproduction—or even experimentalism—can create. The connections between characters and the conversations they have and the rhetorical change they make are more important than what these characters can do to move society or, indeed, even the story forward. In other words, Cavendish creates a queer way for people bonded to each other to build and maintain a deep intimacy outside of the demands of society, and to move toward a future and a legacy built on desire and thought, rather than reproduction and action. Rhetorical creation, for Cavendish, is mutable and meant to benefit the characters and their relationships, not the world at large. Thus, her characters use conversation, debate, and persuasion to advance their own agendas and build their own reputations rather than to benefit society as a whole. In order to settle a dispute between the concept of Fortune and the Duke, as the Duchess believes that the Duke and Fortune are “enemies,” the Duchess calls on the Empress, who arranges for them to work out their differences before a judge.283 With Prudence and Honesty advocating for the Duke, Folly and Rashness speaking for Fortune, and Truth as the judge, what plays out is an extended questioning about the misfortunes that the Duke experienced. The speeches made are meant to persuade Truth to support one side or help them reconcile, and delivery is emphasized:

As soon as the Duchess’s speech was ended, Folly and Rashness started up, and both spake so think and fast at once, that not only the assembly, but themselves were not able to understand each other: at which

283 Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, in The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 195.

174 Fortune was somewhat out of countenance, and commanded them either to speak singly, or be silent: but Prudence told her Ladyship. She should command them to speak wisely, as well as singly; otherwise, said she, it were best for them not to speak at all: which Fortune resented very ill, and told Prudence, she was too bold; and then commanded Folly to declare what she would have made known: but her speech was so foolish, mixed with such nonsense, that none knew what to make of it; besides, it was so tedious, that Fortune bid her silent.284

These characters have their virtues ingrained in their names and demonstrated in their speech. Folly and Rashness are not able to judge how to best deliver their speeches, and end up speaking over one another. Their delivery mangles their message, and their attempt at persuading Truth goes poorly because they cannot decide how to speak, nor how to manage their speeches. Fortune can recognize that they are representing her inadequately, but the best advice she can give is to tell them not to speak at once. When Folly tries to speak alone, her speech is not even printed in the text: instead, it is labeled “foolish,” “mixed with nonsense,” and “tedious.” While the other speeches are printed in full, Folly’s delivery and inability to argue her points “wisely” has her cut from the text. The rhetorical creation modeled here values eloquence in delivery and, while each speech seems to be composed on the spot, it is still meant to represent the speaker and the subject properly. The Duke is represented by the ways that his representatives can comport themselves in this impromptu courtroom, and Fortune comes off poorly by the lack of ability in delivery presented by Folly and Rashness. Even more than the emphasis on eloquence in rhetorical creation presented here, though, is the creation and ephemerality of the court scene in itself. The scene concludes with:

284 Ibid., 198.

175 Fortune hearing thus Honesty’s plain speech, though it very rude, and would not hearken to Truth’s judgment, but went away in a passion: at which, both the Empress and Duchess were extremely troubled, that their endeavours should have no better effect: but Honesty chid the Duchess, and said, she was to be punished for desiring so much Fortune’s favors.285

The creation of the scene, with its emphasis on persuasion, declaration, and eloquence, is dissolved in much the same way. Rhetorical creation, then, is meant to work out the relationships between the characters and strengthen their bonds with virtue, but does not lead to any lasting change or societal impact. Rhetoric and conversation align themselves with Edelman’s death drive: outside of and useless to the futurity of society. While the bond created between the Duke, Duchess, and Empress is important for the characters themselves, and is based on their conversations and communing soul-to-soul, it conflicts with the desires of the worlds in which they live and actively works against them. Cavendish creates a world where “the ‘side’ [of queer anti- futurism] where narrative realization and derealization overlap, where the energies of vitalization ceaselessly turn against themselves; the ‘side’ outside all political sides, committed as they are, on every side, to futurism’s unquestioned good.”286 When the Empress asks the Duchess how to restore order to the Blazing World and render it “peaceable, quiet and happy, as it was before,” the Duchess simply replies, “she would advise her Majesty to introduce the same form of government again, which had been before; that is, to have but one sovereign, one religion, one law, and one language, so

285 Ibid., 200.

286 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 7.

176 that the world might be but as one united family, without divisions.”287 The Empress’s marriage gives her ultimate power, but with that power comes social disruption of the prescribed hierarchies that create harmony in the world. The Empress’ contributions come to nothing, to the point where the world would be better managed without her influence. The Empress, then, contributes nothing but understanding, communication, and connection to the Blazing World—all of her policies are reversed, and she does not even add to the monarchy by having children with the Emperor. The Empress creates queer rhetorical tactics of subversion, conversations and choices that circumvent and discuss the natural order instead of adding to it, rather than anything concrete in the worlds she inhabits. Her relationships succeed in subverting the hierarchies and categories that dominate the Blazing World by stagnating social progress and ignoring social convention, and she deliberately creates a legacy of the mind rather than of the state or the family. This legacy only lasts in the minds of Cavendish’s readers, for her effect on her own world is negated. Cavendish creates a space of rhetorical creation for her characters, one that allows them to develop their own choices and legacies in a societal system that expects specific connections: where they are meant to marry and procreate, they share bodies and commune with souls; where they are meant to admire scientific categories they rearrange categories at will; where they are meant to create, they instead discuss.

Cavendish makes clear her choice for a society, even a utopia, is one that focuses on talking, writing, and categorizing, often while not changing anything substantially and

287 Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, in The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 201.

177 only doing the work because it is intellectually stimulating for the one doing it. While this might seem a bleak legacy for rhetoric within her works, The Blazing World still exists as a text for us to read. In other words, though rhetoric is undone within the Blazing World itself, the connection of conversation and persuasion to intellectualism is maintained on the page and for readers to consume. The Blazing World is a fictional world that affects the real world, even when the rhetoric in the space of the text is ephemeral, as just as “The Duchess” and “The Empress” are characters, their rhetoric also is created and negated only on the page. Despite this, their legacies exist in our world—characters who create, desire, and destroy and therefore make room for women who play with rhetoric and sexuality. Though their experiments would have consequences in a physical reality, the Duchess and Empress can advance their own conversations and desires (and then destroy them) without fear of repercussion, and through reading about them, we gain a sense of the power that comes with rhetorical play. Cavendish creates a space for rhetorical creation, play, and negation, and adds to the history of feminist rhetoric a place for women to create their legacies through thought and desire. Like the metaphysical representation of Cavendish meant to come alive in readers’ thoughts, the Duchess and Empress’s rhetoric comes to life in those who read about it. Cavendish’s queer futurity is one of intellectual choice rather than societal progress. Her characters work to carve spaces of intellectual curiosity and failure into a genre that often comments on societal change. She creates options for women who want to talk and write their way to more understanding.

Varied Bodies, Varied Speech, and Threatened Chastity Blazing World creates intellectual legacies through writing, conversation, and categorization, and Cavendish’s own reputation is embedded within her story with the

178 character of the Duchess. In Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, the main character also works to build herself a legacy, but her fear of losing her chastity means that her focus is more on innate virtues, like those that got the Empress accepted to the Blazing World, than on an intellectual future.288 However virtue-focused her story starts out, on the way to preserving her chastity she builds herself another lasting reputation: as a general and negotiator, in part because of her powers of speech and in part because of her nebulous identity that changes throughout the story. In other words, her legacy starts out as her chastity, but through her experiments with gender and the necessity of speaking publicly created by outside pressures from her travels, she makes a much more enduring legacy: one of a leader and a fighter, who also preserves her virtues. In the space of the text, her legacy becomes much bigger than a fight over chastity, allowing her to remain virtuous while also mastering masculine arts of public speaking and commanding an army. Outside the text, Assaulted and Pursued Chastity reconciles women-centered virtues and the intellectual abilities, like mastering

288 Assaulted and Pursued Chastity is a short piece of prose fiction included in Cavendish’s collection Natures Pictures, published in 1656, which includes both prose and poetry. The story outlines the experience of a “Lady” who leaves her homeland, the Kingdom of Riches, during a civil war in order to find a better life. Unfortunately, she is forced to use violent means to protect her chastity and escape from a married Prince who is attracted to her. She disguises herself as a man and forms a father-son bond with the man captaining her escape ship, and together they sail to a land of cannibals where they are first sentenced be sacrificed and then, because of Travellia’s public speaking talents, worshipped as gods. They are then shipwrecked with pirates led by the Prince, and finally the Lady becomes a general in the Queen of Amity’s army, literally crusading to protect the Queen’s chastity from the King of Amour, whose offer of marriage the Queen has declined. Instead, the Queen falls for the Lady until her identity as a woman is revealed, and then the Lady marries the newly widowed Prince and the Queen marries the King, and together they all live and reign over Amity and Amour.

179 rhetoric, that she uses on her way to preserving her virtues. Through her innate identity as chaste and her fluid conception of gender and naming, Cavendish’s story uses speech, conversation, and negotiation to build a legacy of power and intelligence for a character, who uses her virtues to be known for much more than just her chastity by the end of the text. While her chastity is innate and her legacy of strength and intelligence built to protect it, the main character’s gender is more malleable than the legacies she builds or the rhetoric she uses to do so, and instead is used as a tool rather than an immutable fact. At the conclusion of Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, the main character, most often called Travellia, moves away from the cross-dressing that she has engaged in for most of the story by claiming: “Thus with my masculine clothes I have laid by my masculine spirit; yet not so by, but I shall take it up again, if it be to serve the Queen and kingdom, to whom I owe my life for many obligations.”289 While Travellia’s cross-dressing seems to be at a close at this point in the story, she acknowledges her possession of what she calls a “masculine spirit,” states her devotion to her queen over even her king or her husband, and stakes a claim on her ability to pull on her masculinity again in order to serve properly. While Travellia acknowledges her masculine identity as a means to an end here, she has no plans to put it aside indefinitely. Instead, Travellia’s masculinity is a part of her that can be used again if need be, and is directly connected to her devotion to her queen. Her connection to masculinity, and to a woman who wanted to take her as a lover, are permanent fixtures of Travellia’s life, the same as her chastity is to her body. The heteronormative ending,

289 Margaret Cavendish, Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, in The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 115.

180 then, is more than willing to be subverted again. Travellia demonstrates the existence of a potential genderqueer character in early modern writing, as her identity is structured through the story’s deliberate use of naming and speech that builds her legacy and allows her access to historically womanly virtues and manly uses of speech and power. The remainder of this chapter engages with two main concepts used in Assaulted and Pursued Chastity: the anomaly of the naming practices, and the ways that Travellia uses her speech to negotiate both her assumed and assigned gender to create a legacy of both chastity and power. The naming in Assaulted and Pursued Chastity labels characters based outward identity, focusing on the ways that others see the characters. The names of the characters do little to show the lasting contributions that they make, or ways that they will be remembered at the end of the plot. Instead, naming is mutable, underscoring the mutability of identity throughout the text. While virtues and rhetoric make themselves known as constants, names and gender and identity are fluid to help build virtues and contribute to rhetoric. Using unusual and fluid names, Cavendish calls attention to situations and emotions and builds connections between characters and the words they use to define themselves. Naming for those outside of the main character uses primarily title or job rather than anything more personal—something seen in other Cavendish works and notably with the characters of the Empress and Duchess in

Blazing World. The Queen in the story is only referred to by title, as is the antagonistic Prince chasing Travellia and the angry King pursuing the Queen. Travellia’s father figure, picked up during her travels, is referred to predominately as “old man” throughout, rather than by any other marker of his life or personality. This pattern of naming creates a problem for the main character, whose position changes throughout

181 the text. Starting as a young, displaced woman and then becoming a travelling young man, a general, and finally a married woman, the main character chooses her name based on her current life circumstances and, occasionally, her disposition. She starts as a Lady, capital L, and then moves to become Miseria, then Affectionata, and then Travellia when she chooses to run and disguise herself as a man, and then finally Princess when she marries the Prince. Travellia, then, has a flexibility of naming that connects directly to her flexibility of identity, so that she can change as her circumstances change. This fluidity is also seen in the pronouns used in the text— when Travellia is disguised as a man, he/him pronouns are most often used, though a bit inconsistently, and when dressed as a woman, she/her pronouns are used. Her pronouns change depending on her chosen identity, even though the name “Travellia” seems to be coded more female.290 Naming and pronouns here, then, are not innate— unlike the Empress and Travellia’s virtues, they change along with the circumstances in the characters’ lives, rather than reflecting their inner selves. While naming is a flexible change that reflects characters’ situations but not anything deeper about their lives, Travellia creates her reputation through use of both her genders and relies on the skills that she develops—as both a woman and a man— to argue for her own abilities and create opportunities to build and defend her legacy.

Marina Leslie claims that “rather than disguising or disclosing gender by turns, her use of cross-dressing generally works to destabilize and challenge gender as a natural

290 While for the sake of this discussion I’ve chosen she/her pronouns for consistency with scholarship on the text, this is not as an endorsement of a feminine identity for Travellia.

182 marker of identity and difference.”291 Travellia’s cross-dressing is less about the benefits it brings her, though it does help her to protect her chastity and hold on to the virtues that she uses to define herself, and more about how Cavendish’s ideas of legacy are constructed by actions and virtues, rather than by rules of identity imparted by naming or gender. In particular, she gives Travellia access to types of communication that are often only open to men, as they can benefit her as both a man and a woman. Donawerth’s theory of conversational rhetoric shows that women developed a method of rhetorical theory that does not rely on open public speaking, which was often not available for women to use.292 Travellia is held to this standard, so she instead of speaking openly as a woman, she speaks publicly disguised as a man, changing her gender rather than the rules of rhetoric. She uses the best of herself in both genders to create a future that is not dependent on either gender. Travellia’s identity, as the identities of all of those in the text, is governed by use-value, and therefore so is her gender. When her chastity is in question, it is easier for her to act as a man, and when she can make long-term connections via marriage, she takes up being a woman again. Travellia’s gender, names, and pronouns are all mutable markers of identity that do not get at the inherent values of the characters, and are used to develop their legacies rather than being important facets of the characters alone.

291 Marina Leslie, “Evading Rape and Embracing Empire in Margaret Cavendish’s Assaulted and Pursued Chastity,” in Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 190.

292 Jane Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women's Tradition, 1600-1900 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012).

183 Travellia uses her mutable identities to adapt to the rules and limitations that rhetoric can put on her body, building her virtues and legacy through manipulating rules with her play on identity and gender. Travellia starts her story by speaking in private spaces about morality, using conversational rhetoric to negotiate for herself the way she, as a young woman, she is permitted to do. She uses epideictic rhetoric, demonstrating morality and calling attention to virtue, as it functions best in the closed spaces where women are allowed to speak freely. For example, in conversation with the Prince who is pursuing her throughout the story, Travellia says in response to his opinion about her beauty and his desire for it: “She answered, that if is senses or her person did betray her to his lust, she wished them all annihilated, or at least buried in dust: but I hope, said she, by your noble and civil usage, you will give me cause to pray for you, and not to wish you evil; for why should you rob me of that which Nature freely gave?”293 While her words may seem harsh, especially directed to a man who clearly has more power than her as a Prince and a man who clearly covets her body, the Lady is in her element here, arguing against his lust and for the ability to be both beautiful and chaste, or to die if this is not possible for her. She is also debating her chastity with the Prince, giving him space to respond and argue back at her. Her confidence and adeptness in this moment is because morality is her long-term argument for maintaining a reputation and legacy for chastity. Her speech so far aligns with her gender—she only uses conversation in private spaces and moral arguments about her own virtue as a woman. She allows her gender, in this case, to dictate the rhetoric available to her, even when her legacy and her life are at stake.

293 Margaret Cavendish, Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, in The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 52.

184 However, using epideictic rhetoric in isolated moments is not enough for Travellia to protect her chastity, and when she is forced out of private spaces into more public spaces of argumentation to defend her life and her morals, she takes on a male identity so that she conforms with rules of propriety and rhetoric while still maintaining her innate virtues. When escaping the Prince’s antics, Travellia travelled to a land of cannibals who wanted to sacrifice her, and she has to rely on her speaking abilities to protect her life and the Old Man she travels with. She does this by appealing to their morality, but in a public rather than a private setting. In a section set off from the rest of the text as “The Speech,” Travellia uses rhetoric and specific actions together to convince these people not only that they should not sacrifice her, but also that they are behaving in ways that shame their gods:

Pious friends, for so I may call you, being willing to please the gods; but your ignorance hath led you wrong ways: yet the gods seeing your zeal, though through a false devotion, pitying your ignorance did by their wisdom find means to appease the wrath of their justice, for every attribute of the gods must have a satisfaction […] Thus have the gods sent us to you, and to stay so long amongst you as you can learn and know their commands, then return unto them.294 She judges their past choices and provides a path forward for them to repent, using her speech to first condemn those that imprisoned her and then establish herself as an expert on religion and repentance. As Travellia takes up a masculine identity, she has access to masculine behaviors and male patterns of rhetoric. In this case, she combines the epideictic rhetoric of earlier, discussing the morality of her captors, and ties it to forensic rhetoric, discussing their past actions and judging their behaviors. More importantly, she is not speaking in a private conversation meant to preserve her values,

294 Ibid., 71-75.

185 but in public and in front of an audience, not in a conversation but a speech. In addition, the actions she takes with this rhetoric is not merely fleeing, as she did before—instead, it is taking up a gun and killing those that threatened her most. All these actions would be limited by the rules of rhetoric and access were she not presenting as male. She takes on forensic rhetoric and public discourse as a male figure, which allows her both to succeed in protecting her virtue and to instill virtues in those around her, a feat that is not accessible to her when she is read as a woman. It also creates a legacy for her that transcends the gendered rules of rhetoric—which Cavendish upholds here—as her rhetorical abilities exist in her both as a woman and a man, as do her virtues. It is merely her gender that needs to change in order to cement her legacy as virtuous, intelligent, and a capable rhetor. As Travellia’s voyages move to their eventual conclusion, she continues to use traditional gender roles, both male and female, in order to convince the other characters in the story that she has legitimate claims to her masculine identity and to the abilities she has access to during her use of it. After finally leaving her cannibalistic captors for good, Travellia becomes the general of the Queen of Amity’s army, as well as a close personal friend and confidante of the queen. At the end of her time with the army, she makes another public address where she discusses her chastity and cross-dressing at length in order to move from her masculine to her feminine identity. While a woman addressing an army seems improper by traditional rules of rhetoric, Travellia makes an epideictic speech about her own morality, arguing for the army to accept her as she is. The speech bridges her male and female form, as halfway through she changes into women’s clothes and continues, retiring her male form for the time being. Her speech while dressed as a man starts with an admission of her

186 assigned gender, which she takes up once again to discuss her conflation of chastity and feminine virtue: “For as love of the soul and body is inseparable, so should the love of chastity, and the effeminate sex; and who can love, and not share in danger … nor any worldly felicity, must separate the love of chastity, and our sex.”295 Travellia works to convince the army that she is justified in taking on a male persona, for it was to protect her chastity. She demonstrates in her speech how chastity and the female sex are inseparable, even when she separates her identity from her female gender. She connects chastity to truth, love, and ultimately, virtue, justifying her actions—which include leading the army in battle and getting so close to their queen that the queen fell in love with her—because of her need to defend her virtues. Her chastity is more closely linked to her body than even her female form, for she is more willing to give up her gender than be seen as one who is not chaste and virtuous. Her chastity is linked to her gender but survives a shedding of this gender, even when she acts more in accordance with male virtues and uses masculine rhetorics. Katheryn Schwarz describes chastity as a guarded female virtue, both patriarchal in its control of women’s bodies and subversive when woman control their own.296 Travellia uses her own virtue to dictate morality to others, advocating for her own chastity in public because of the legacy of virtue and capability she has created, and because can switch between genders. She needs both to speak in public and argue for her female values, and so she uses both genders within the same speech. Travellia cements her legacy

295 Margaret Cavendish, Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, in The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 115.

296 Katheryn Schwarz, “Chastity, Militant and Married: Cavendish’s Romance, Milton’s Masque” PMLA 118, no. 2 (March 2003): 270-285. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1261414.

187 both as a virtuous woman and an eloquent and effective leader through her speech to her devoted army. Travellia uses both a masculine and feminine identity not just to protect her chastity, but also to preserve a new legacy that she developed while using her masculine identity as a general, a public speaker, and a friend of the queen. Halfway through her speech to the army discussed in the last paragraph, Travellia changes into her women’s clothes, but she then claims that she is willing to become a man again to protect the queen. This move is an odd one, for on the one hand she claims to have cross-dressed in order to protect her own morals, but now claims that she will do so again with no repercussions and without the same need. Travellia’s gender is most in question at this point, when she admits freely that she will not conform to one (female) gender even after the threat to her chastity is over and she will be married. Instead, she forever stakes claim to her masculine identity, considering it a part of her “spirit” that can (and will) be taken up again. The army is not upset by her declaration of femininity, or her admission that she may one day present as masculine again. They cheer, confess their love regardless of her sex, and call her an angel, not bothered by the fact that she passed as masculine for so long to command them and that gained the love of their Queen in this guise. Cavendish’s tale ends with this admission and acceptance, and the two kingdoms are forever united in “Amour” and “Amity.”

Travellia’s speech convinces her followers of her innocence and chastity, and she is able to declaim publically because of her dual gender presentation. In short, her legacy as both a general and as a chaste woman are both cemented because of her skills as an orator.

188 Cavendish’s Travellia is able to be a traveller, general in an army, and lover of another noblewoman along with being a chaste woman because of her flexible gender presentation. Travellia’s use of rhetoric makes her a character committed to discussing her own chastity in semi-private settings, as well as dictating the ways to develop virtues to an entire ruling class when dressed as a man. In other words, Cavendish finds the rules of rhetoric harder to cross than the rules of gender. Travellia flips between exclusively female and exclusively male identities that conform to typical ideas about early modern gender, and she happily abandons her “masculine spirit” as the only way to marry—and marry the man that threatened her chastity in the first place. Characters like Travellia create moments where gender is something that can be challenged or changed instead of a monolith that can only be upheld. Simone Chess shows that, when cross-dressing happens in early modern texts, the actions tend to challenge larger social or moral structures, rather than just benefiting the cross- dressing individuals.297 Travellia’s gender switching certainly fits this model, as it exposes the limits put on speakers and actors by such trivial identity markers as gender. Chess goes on to claim that, “further, when an MTF [male to female] crossdresser’s gender is embedded in and mutually constitutive with these larger systems, the crossdresser and his/ her/ their allies often benefit financially, socially, and erotically from that queer exchange.”298 Though Travellia is a female to male cross-dresser in this text, her exchange of gender certainly does benefit her, the Old Man, the Queen, Amity, and, eventually, the Prince. While Assaulted and Pursued

297 Simone Chess, Male to Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations (New York: Routledge, 2016), 2.

298 Ibid.

189 Chastity ends in heterosexual marriages and upholds some gender roles, particularly those associated with rhetoric, it still allows Travellia some flexibility in choosing her gender and her allegiance to her queen. While rhetoric and virtue remain rigid, gender and naming are flexible, and their flexibility is an unquestionable good in Travellia’s life and throughout the text. Travellia’s virtues are innate in her body, but her gender is not. Because of her ability to change her gender, Travellia is able to preserve her chastity and her reputation as virtuous. Her time presenting as masculine also allows her to develop a legacy not just as chaste but as an orator and a leader. Cavendish gives Travellia the tactics necessary not just to protect her virtue but to develop an even stronger and more far-reaching legacy, showing readers that intelligence and chastity can reside in the same body.

Cavendish’s Legacies of Virtue and Intelligence Margaret Cavendish’s legacy was created, at least in part, by Margaret Cavendish: by her insistence on writing and publishing her works, and by the way she included herself in said works. While she was successful in cementing this legacy because of the support from her husband and the power afforded to her through her connection to the monarchy and her own nobility, it was her own commitment to having a legacy that we see reflected in the works she wrote. As such, it is not just her own legacy but her commitment to diverse legacies for women that comes through in her work. The Empress, the Duchess, and Travellia are three very different characters who take different paths to cement their reputations. They have some surface similarities, such as their personal nobility, their precarious financial situations, and their marriages to even more powerful men. Despite these underlying connections, though, their real similarities are in the ways that they work to be remembered for

190 what they do and for what they know. While Travellia is committed to preserving her virtue, she does not stop there: in protecting her chastity, she also protects her life, and the virtue of the Queen of Amity and the lives of her followers. While the Empress starts off being captured, she creates a legacy through her attempt at writing a Cabbala and her scientific ordering and understanding of her world. While the Duchess starts as an advisor, she aspires to be a ruler like her friend and lover, the Empress. In pursuit of these goals, many other rules are bent: none of the women have children, and only the Duchess has more than a passing acquaintance with her husband. Lovers can be platonic and same-sex, and gender is mutable as long as virtue is inherent. Most importantly, though, is the connection between legacy and rhetoric. Through her act of writing Cavendish creates her legacy, and long moments of speech, of conversation, and of questioning are set aside in her work. Cavendish links her legacy and the intellectual legacies of the characters she deems virtuous with their rhetorical skill.

191 Chapter 6

CONCLUSION: NEGOTIATING GENDER, SEX, AND WRITING AS WOMEN

While researching Elizabeth Cary at one of the several libraries I was fortunate enough to use throughout working on this dissertation, I found myself browsing the sections devoted to Renaissance authors. This particular library had about half a shelf worth of texts devoted to Margaret Cavendish’s work, which seems like a modest but fair representation of her influence in the field. However, next to her half-shelf was John Milton’s section, which comprised roughly the rest of the shelves in the isle, on both sides of the stacks. Even knowing that Elizabeth Cary has less work on her than Cavendish, her section was a stark contrast to the power of Milton: four books, total, three of which were different versions of The Tragedy of Miriam. Cary, too, has the misfortune to be categorized near another, better-known male author: this time, William Shakespeare. While he has isle after isle of shelving devoted to his plays, criticism about his plays, speculation about his biography, and connections between his work and other writers, Cary gets lost in the mix with a few editions of her work and one collection of criticism. Nothing illustrates the gap between how we treat male and female authors more than the stark reality of the physical space we make for one and not the other. Elizabeth Cary was a historical figure, a pioneer of women’s published writing, and a talented and educated author, and yet her work is still so often relegated to an anomaly—look, a woman also wrote plays! We both need to open up spaces to

192 understand these women through the masculine frameworks already in place, and to create new frameworks where we listen seriously to the ideas these women pose. We also need to use new methods of reading, criticism, and comprehension to teach, read, and learn from their works. This dissertation is an attempt to do just that—to open up the ways that women authors are taken up and explored. Through the lenses of feminist rhetoric and queer theory, this work shows the many different texts and ideas that women open up for us, and the benefits of reading old texts by women even today, when their words have been committed to the page for a long time. In this final and brief chapter, I work though the potential impact that work like this can have, as we move forward to more work on women’s writing and the impacts they can have on the fields of feminist rhetoric and queer theory. With more research done on women in the Renaissance, in rhetoric and in all areas, we can flesh out the ways that these women matter for our modern conceptions of womanhood and sexuality. Elizabeth Tudor, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Wroth, and Margaret Cavendish lived in an over-100-year span and wrote vastly different texts. Cary and Wroth focused most of their energy on a few (if rather long, on Wroth’s part) texts; Elizabeth I and Cavendish wrote prolifically across genres. Each used persuasive tactics to articulate the ways that women move through the world; Cary, Wroth, and Cavendish created unorthodox female characters and Elizabeth I used intimate narrators in her poems to articulate ways of desiring, feeling, and living as women that were otherwise little documented in the time. In addition, their use of games, conversation, argument, speeches, and debate work to allow women their own, nuanced articulations of bodies, family, love, marriage, and desire. The use of language to persuade, to inform, and to advocate for morality is not limited to speeches, treatises, and historical texts. While

193 divining the rhetorical purposes or choices in poetry, drama, and stories can be challenging, focusing on narrators and characters as has been done here shows the ways that these female characters can be used as voices for desire—just as publication and the sharing of texts can pass around ideas, so too can the voices of characters and narrators argue, persuade, discuss, and introduce thoughtful ideas about morality within larger texts. Through an analysis of the language used by narrators and characters, this dissertation worked to add literature back to the feminist rhetoric canon, to increase the amount of work done on Renaissance women authors, and study the ways that rhetoric and desire coexist. Each of these women articulates her desires differently: Elizabeth I modulates her gender through her powerful and demonstrative language; Cary gives women ways to manipulate and persuade even as she links bodies and morality; Wroth gives women an enhanced vocabulary for desire and the ability for games and wordplay, allowing women to make their own fates; and Cavendish creates bonds between and legacies for women in ways that circumvent the family model. Taken together, they show the many ways that women’s writing can be linked to bodies, desires, and sexualities. They advocate for understandings of women and women’s writing that are more complex and diverse, that use language as extensions of their bodies, emotions, and desires.

While typical understandings of sexuality categorize people into “normal” or

“other,” understandings of queerness instead give us a spectrum to map sexuality onto. In a time when heterosexuality was not just a norm, but expected and enforced, the ways we understand sexuality have to be expanded. Even when these women present as normative, then, their expressions of their sexualities argues for such a spectrum to understand them: Elizabeth I never married; Elizabeth Cary spent much of her

194 marriage separated from her husband; Mary Wroth had two children with her married cousin while clearly a single woman; and Margaret Cavendish was happily married but childless. In addition, the ways these women expressed the relationship between desire and female bodies argue for a more open understanding of sexuality. They frequently bend “rules” of gender and sexuality, allowing desire to take place between two or more women, associating particular desires with women, drawing family lines and honoring other commitments before marital bonds, and creating legacies that do not include marriage or families at all. They promote female dominance, invite bonds between women, denigrate men who are poor husbands, use their voices to create change, bend and change their genders. While we often assume queer identities can only exist when we have words for them, the characters these women create argue for a spectrum understanding of sexuality and gender—they operate well in normative spaces, but both character and author choose non-normative performances of desire and gender and advocate for non-normative presentations of gender and sexuality. Finishing this dissertation in 2020, we find ourselves confronting a worldwide pandemic in the midst of a recurring fight for the rights of Black people in the United States. While this text cannot possibly address all or even most of the concerns that protests, activism, and medical research are tackling, I hope that the issues taken up here can help as we move forward as a society. This text shows that even these wealthy, white women have been written out of the historical narrative, though by amassing power and support as well as co-opting the language of the patriarchy, they were able to temporarily crack into these narratives. More study on the ways that patriarchy operated and how some were able to manipulate and subvert it can perhaps help us to tackle oppression today. But most importantly, I hope this dissertation

195 demonstrates ways that we—as people with more access to writing and publishing than has ever existed before—can use the tactics that these women provide to advance queer and feminist beliefs. The use of women’s voices as vehicles of non-normative expression opens spaces for change, particularly in time periods where women’s voices are currently still underrepresented in study. With more knowledge about the ways these spaces were opened before, often in ways that still flew largely under the radar, we can adapt our tactics to encompass more people and push back against spaces of rhetoric, writing, and understanding that are still dominated by patriarchal voices and assumptions. The introduction of this dissertation brought up the concept of reading rhetorically, even when texts are not seen as explicitly rhetorical. Throughout this dissertation, I demonstrate ways that rhetorical reading can be used to examine narrators in poetry and characters in stories and plays to analyze their rhetorical choices and how they use bodies, games, speeches, and silence to persuade others and demonstrate their own morality. Rhetorical reading creates space for texts that otherwise do not seem as though they make rhetorical arguments, but more importantly it allows for generous interpretation that anything read in the right way can make an argument. Using this technique, other texts that may not be considered strictly rhetorical can be included in rhetorical education and study—thus opening an otherwise closed canon to many different texts, and different people who create texts. While rhetoric has a history of being exclusionary, alternate ways of reading, of paying attention to persuasion and argumentation, can open the canon to those it was originally designed to exclude. With a focus less on oratory and more on ways language and bodies can make points across a variety of mediums, women, BIPOC of

196 all genders, and LGBTQ+ people are acknowledged as those who can be rhetors and those who shaped our long history of rhetoric.

197 REFERENCES

Andreadis, Harriette. Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics, 1550-1714. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Battigelli, Anna. Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998.

Beemer, Cristy. “The Female Monarchy: A Rhetorical Strategy of Early Modern Rule.” Rhetoric Review 30, no. 3 (2011): 258-274. https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2011.581937.

Beemer, Cristy. “God Save the Queen: Kairos and the Mercy Letters of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots.” Rhetoric Review 35, no. 2 (2016): 75-90. https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2016.1142803.

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

Bennett, Lyn. Women Writing of Divinest Things: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Pembroke, Wroth, and Lanyer. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004.

Bernard, G. W. Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

Bizzell, Patricia. “Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do They Make?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30, no. 4 (Autumn 2000): 5-17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3886115.

Bizzell, Patricia and Bruce Herzberg, “Baldesar Castiglione.” In The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, 2nd ed. Edited by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, 652. New York: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 1979.

Bromley, James M. and Will Stockton, editors. Sex Before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Buchanan, Lindal and Kathleen J. Ryan, editors. Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies. West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2010.

198 Cary, Elizabeth. The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry. Edited by Ramona Wray. New York: Arden Early Modern Drama, 2012.

Castiglione, Baldesar. The Book of the Courtier. In The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, 2nd ed., edited by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, 661-662. New York: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 1979.

Cavanagh, Sheila T. Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001.

Cavendish, Margaret. Assaulted and Pursued Chastity. In The Blazing World and Other Writings, edited by Kate Lilley, 45-118. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.

Cavendish, Margaret. The Blazing World and Other Writings. Edited by Kate Lilley. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.

Cavendish, Margaret. The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World. In The Blazing World and Other Writings, edited by Kate Lilley, 119-225. New York: Penguin Classics, 1994.

Chapuys, Eustace to Charles V, 199. In Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol. X, arranged and catalogued by James Gairdner (Vaduz: Kraus Reprint Ltd., 1965).

Chess, Simone. Male to Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Coles, Kimberly Anne. “‘Perfect Hole’: Elizabeth I, Spenser, and Chaste Productions.” English Literary Renaissance 32, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 31-61. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24463708.

Conley, Thomas M. Rhetoric in the European Tradition. New York: Longman, 1990.

Connors, Robert J. Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Distiller, Natasha. Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Dolmage, Jay Timothy. Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014.

199 Donawerth, Jane. Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women's Tradition, 1600-1900. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Elizabeth I. “An Answer (Poem 7b).” In The Folger Shakespeare Library Presents Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, edited by Steven W. May, 16-17. New York: Washington Square Press, 2004.

Elizabeth I. “The Doubt of Future Foes (Poem 4).” In The Folger Shakespeare Library Presents Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, edited by Steven W. May, 7. New York: Washington Square Press, 2004.

Elizabeth I. “The First Answer to the New Parliament Concerning Mary Stuart (November 12, 1586).” In The copie of a letter to the Right Honourable the Earle of Leycester. London: Christopher Barker, 1586. Reprinted in Elizabeth I and her Age: Authoritative Texts, Commentary and Criticism, edited by Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch. 348-351. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009.

Elizabeth I. “On Monsieur’s Departure (Poem 6, Sonetto).” In The Folger Shakespeare Library Presents Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, edited by Steven W. May, 12. New York: Washington Square Press, 2004.

Elizabeth I. “The Queen’s Speech at Tilbury Camp (Speech 10).” In The Folger Shakespeare Library Presents Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, edited by Steven W. May, 77-78. New York: Washington Square Press, 2004.

Elizabeth I. “The Second Answer Made by the Queen’s Majesty (November 24, 1586).” In The copie of a letter to the Right Honourable the Earle of Leycester. London: Christopher Barker, 1586. Reprinted in Elizabeth I and her Age: Authoritative Texts, Commentary and Criticism, edited by Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch, 352-353. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009.

Elizabeth I. “Verses Written with a Diamond (Poem 2).” In The Folger Shakespeare Library Presents Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, edited by Steven W. May, 4. New York: Washington Square Press, 2004.

Ellis, Roger. “The Juvenile Translations of Elizabeth Tutor.” Translation and Literature 18, no. 2 (Autumn 2009): 157-180. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20789071.

200 Fink, Laurie. “The Hidden Curriculum.” In “Symposium: Editing a Norton Anthology,”189-196. College English 66, no. 2 (Nov. 2003): 172-206. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3594265.

Fleming, Juliet. Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.

Foxe, John. Actes and monuments of these latter and perilous dayes touching matters of the Church (London: John Day, 1563). Reprinted in Elizabeth I and her Age: Authoritative Texts, Commentary and Criticism, edited by Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch, 32-39. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009.

Gale, Xin Liu. “Historical Studies and Postmodernism: Rereading Aspasia of Miletus.” College English 62, no. 3 (January 2000): 361-386. https://www.jstor.org/stable/378936.

Glenn, Cheryl. Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997.

Glenn, Cheryl. “Truth, Lies, and Method: Revisiting Feminist Historiography.” College English 62, no. 3 (January 2000): 387-389. http://www.jstor.org/stable/378937.

Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History, 20th Anniversary Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Greenblatt, Stephen, general editor. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, The Sixteenth Century and the Early Seventeenth Century. Vol. B. 9th ed. New York: Norton, 2012.

Gutierrez, Nancy A. “Valuing Mariam: Genre Study and Feminist Analysis.” In Elizabeth Cary: Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550- 1700, vol. 6, edited by Karen Raber, 102-105. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009.

Halberstam, Jack. “The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies.” Graduate Journal of Social Science 5, no. 2 (2008): 140-156. http://gjss.org/content/anti-social-turn- queer-studies.

Hannay, Margaret P. Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010.

201 Harris, Barbara J. English Aristocratic Women, 1450-1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Jarratt, Susan C. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.

Jarratt, Susan C. “Rhetoric and Feminism: Together Again.” College English 62, no. 3 (January 2000): 390-393. http://www.jstor.org/stable/378938.

Kegl, Rosemary. “‘The World I Have Made’: Margaret Cavendish, Feminism, and the Blazing-World.” In Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, edited by Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan, 119-141. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Kennedy, George A. Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

The Lady Falkland: Her Life by One of Her Daughters. In The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry, edited by Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson, 183-275. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Larson, Katherine R. “Conversational Games and the Articulation of Desire in ‘Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost’ and Mary Wroth’s ‘Love’s Victory.’” English Literary Renaissance 40, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 165-190. https://doi- org.udel.idm.oclc.org/10.1111/j.1475-6757.2010.01065.x.

Larson, Katherine R. Early Modern Women in Conversation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Larson, Katherine R. and Naomi J. Miller with Andrew Strycharski, “Re-Reading Mary Wroth: Networks of Knowing.” In Re-Reading Mary Wroth, edited by Katherine R. Larson and Naomi J. Miller, 1-15. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Leitch, Vincent B. “Editing a Norton Anthology.” In “Symposium: Editing a Norton Anthology,”173-177. College English 66, no. 2 (Nov. 2003): 172-206. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3594265.

Leslie, Marina. “Evading Rape and Embracing Empire in Margaret Cavendish’s Assaulted and Pursued Chastity.” In Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, edited by Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie, 179-197. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1999.

202 Levin, Carole. The Reign of Elizabeth I. New York: Palgrave, 2003.

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

Lilley, Kate. Introduction to Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World and Other Writings, ix-xxxii. Edited by Kate Lilley. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.

Long, Mary Beth. “The Life as Vita: Reading The Lady Falkland Her Life as Hagiography.” English Literary Renaissance 38, no. 2 (2008): 304-330. https://doi-org.udel.idm.oclc.org/10.1111/j.1475-6757.2008.00125.x.

Mackay, Elizabeth Ann. “Shrew(d) Maternities, Elizabeth Cary’s Life, and Filial Equivocations.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 33, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 23- 50. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/564228.

Mattingly, Carol. “Telling Evidence: Rethinking What Counts in Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 32, no. 1 (2002): 99-108. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3886308.

May, Steven W. The Folger Shakespeare Library Presents Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works. New York: Washington Square Press, 2004.

Mears, Natalie. Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Miller, Naomi J. Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996.

Miller, Naomi J. and Gary Waller, editors. Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1991.

Montrose, Louis. The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Moore, Mary B. Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.

Moss, David Grant. “A Queen for Whose Time? Elizabeth I as Icon for the Twentieth Century.” Journal of Popular Culture 35, no. 5 (2006): 796-816. https://doi- org.udel.idm.oclc.org/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2006.00306.x.

Murphy, James J., editor. Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

203 Nesler, Miranda Garno. “Closeted Authority in The Tragedy of Mariam.” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 52, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 363-385. doi:10.1353/sel.2012.0013.

Ostman, Heather E. “Backbiters, Flatterers, and Monarchs: Domestic Politics In Elizabeth Cary: Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550- 1700, vol. 6, edited by Karen Raber, 305-306. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009.

Pender, Patricia. Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Phillips, Kim M. and Barry Reay. Sex Before Sexuality: A Premodern History. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011.

Plato. Gorgias. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive, MIT Classics, 2009. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.html.

Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. Edited by Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Raber, Karen L. “Gender and the Political Subject in The Tragedy of Mariam.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 35, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 321-343. http://www.jstor.org/stable/451028.

Raber, Karen L. Introduction to Elizabeth Cary: Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700, vol. 6, xiv-xv. Edited by Karen L. Raber. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009.

Ralegh, Sir Walter. “Sir Walter Ralegh to the Queen (Poem 7a).” In The Folger Shakespeare Library Presents Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, edited by Steven W. May, 14-15. New York: Washington Square Press, 2004.

Ratcliffe, Krista. Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996.

Ratcliffe, Krista. “Bathsheba’s Dilemma: Defining, Discovering, and Defending Anglo-American Rhetoric(s).” In Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies, edited by Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen J. Ryan, 80-107. West Lafayette: Parlor Press, 2010.

Reynolds, Nedra. “Ethos as Location: New Sites for Understanding Discursive Authority.” Rhetoric Review 11 no. 2 (Spring 1993): 325-338. http://www.jstor.org/stable/465805.

204 Rich, Adrienne Cecil. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1980).” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 3, (Autumn 2003): 11-48. doi:10.1353/jowh.2003.0079.

Ritchie, Joy and Kate Ronald, editors. Available Means: An Anthology of Women’s Rhetoric(s). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001.

Roberts, Josephine A., editor. The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Baton Rogue: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.

Roberts, Josephine A. Introduction to The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, edited by Josephine A. Roberts, 16-50. Baton Rogue: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “Marking Trails in Studies of Race, Gender, and Culture.” In Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture, edited by Jacqueline Jones Royster and Ann Marie Mann Simpkins, 1-14. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.

Salzman, Paul and Marion Wynne-Davies, editors. Mary Wroth and Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Schwarz, Kathryn. “Chastity, Militant and Married: Cavendish’s Romance, Milton’s Masque.” PMLA 118, no. 2 (March 2003): 270-285. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1261414.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “The Epistemology of the Closet.” In Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed. Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 912-921. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Edited by Christopher Ricks. New York: Penguin Books, 1987.

Straznicky, Marta. Privacy, Playreading, and Women’s Closet Drama, 1550-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Strong, Roy C. Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987.

Stump, Donald and Susan M. Felch, editors. Elizabeth I and Her Age. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009.

205 Summit, Jennifer. “‘The Arte of a Ladies Penne’: Elizabeth I and the Poetics of Queenship.” English Literary Renaissance 26, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 395-422. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43447528.

Thell, Anne M. “‘Lady Phoenix’: Margaret Cavendish and the Poetics of Palingenesis,” Early Modern Women 11, no. 1 (Fall 2016): 128-136. https://doi.org/10.1353/emw.2016.0047.

Traub, Valerie. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Traub, Valerie. Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Vives, Juan Luis. The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual. Edited and translated by Charles Fantazzi. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000.

Walker, Kim. “‘This strang labourinth’: Lady Mary Wroth.” In Women Writers of the English Renaissance, 170-190. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996.

Waller, Gary. The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of Gender. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993.

Warburton, Rachel. “‘A Woman hath no… Reason to desire Children for her Own Sake’: Margaret Cavendish Reads Lee Edelman.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 27, no. 3 (2016): 234-251. https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2016.1207276.

Wertheimer, Molly Meijer, editor. Listening to their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.

Wilson, Thomas. The Art of Rhetoric (1560). Edited with notes and commentary by Peter E. Medine. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.

Wray, Ramona. Introduction to Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry, 1-69. Edited by Ramona Wray. New York: Arden Early Modern Drama, 2012.

Wroth, Lady Mary. The First Part of the Contess of Montgomery’s Urania. Edited by Josephine A. Roberts. Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995.

206 Wroth, Mary. From Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. In “Mary Wroth’s Poetry: An Electronic Edition,” edited by Paul Salzman. Last modified June 15, 2012. http://wroth.latrobe.edu.au/all-poems.html.

Wroth, Mary. “Love’s Victory.” In Early Modern Women’s Writing: An Anthology, 1560-1700, edited by Paul Salzman, 82-133. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Wu, Hui. “The Paradigm of Margaret Cavendish: Reading Women’s Alternate Rhetorics in a Global Context.” In Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture, edited by Jacqueline Jones Royster and Ann Marie Mann Simpkins, 171-185. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.

Wynne-Davies, Marion. Women Writers and Familial Discourse in the English Renaissance New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

207