Untitled

Early Modern Literature in History
General Editors: Cedric C. Brown, Emeritus Professor, University of Reading;

Andrew Hadfield, Professor of English, University of Sussex, Brighton
International Advisory Board: Sharon Achinstein, University of Oxford; Jean Howard,
University of Columbia; John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge; Richard McCoy, CUNY;
Michelle O’Callaghan, University of Reading; Cathy Shrank, University of Sheffield; Adam
Smyth, University of London; Steven Zwicker, Washington University, St Louis.
Within the period 1520–1740 this series discusses many kinds of writing, both within and
outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theoretical perspectives,
but they share a historical awareness and an interest in seeing their texts in lively negotia-
tion with their own and successive cultures.
Titles include:
John M. Adrian
LOCAL NEGOTIATIONS OF ENGLISH NATIONHOOD, 1570–1680
Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox
DIPLOMACY AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE
Jocelyn Catty
WRITING RAPE, WRITING WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Unbridled Speech
Patrick Cheney
MARLOWE’S REPUBLICAN AUTHORSHIP
Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime
Bruce Danner
EDMUND SPENSER’S WAR ON LORD BURGHLEY
James Daybell (editor)
EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S LETTER-WRITING, 1450–1700
James Daybell and Peter Hinds (editors)
MATERIAL READINGS OF EARLY MODERN CULTURE
Texts and Social Practices, 1580–1730
James Daybell
THE MATERIAL LETTER IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635
Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield (editors)
THE RELIGIONS OF THE BOOK
Christian Perceptions, 1400–1660
Maria Franziska Fahey
METAPHOR AND SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA
Unchaste Signification
Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. (editors)
ENVIRONMENT AND EMBODIMENT IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Kenneth J.E. Graham and Philip D. Collington (editors)
SHAKESPEARE AND RELIGIOUS CHANGE
Teresa Grant and Barbara Ravelhofer
ENGLISH HISTORICAL DRAMA, 1500–1660
Forms Outside the Canon
Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (editors)
THE INTELLECTUAL CULTURE OF PURITAN WOMEN, 1558–1680
Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham (editors)
THE LAW IN SHAKESPEARE
Claire Jowitt (editor)
PIRATES? THE POLITICS OF PLUNDER, 1550–1650
Gregory Kneidel
RETHINKING THE TURN TO RELIGION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Edel Lamb
PERFORMING CHILDHOOD IN THE EARLY MODERN THEATRE
The Children’s Playing Companies (1599–1613)
Katherine R. Larson
EARLY MODERN WOMEN IN CONVERSATION
Monica Matei-Chesnoiu
RE-IMAGINING WESTERN EUROPEAN GEOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE DRAMA
David McInnis
MIND-TRAVELLING AND VOYAGE DRAMA IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Scott L. Newstok
QUOTING DEATH IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb
P. Pender
EARLY MODERN WOMAN’S WRITING AND THE RHETORIC OF MODESTY
Jane Pettegree
FOREIGN AND NATIVE ON THE ENGLISH STAGE, 1588–1611
Metaphor and National Identity
Fred Schurink (editor)
TUDOR TRANSLATION
Adrian Streete (editor)
EARLY MODERN DRAMA AND THE BIBLE
Contexts and Readings, 1570–1625
Mary E. Trull
PERFORMING PRIVACY AND GENDER IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE
Marion Wynne-Davies
WOMEN WRITERS AND FAMILIAL DISCOURSE IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE
Relative Values
The series Early Modern Literature in History is published in association with the Early
Modern Research Centre at the University of Reading and The Centre for Early Modern
Studies at the University of Sussex
Early Modern Literature in History

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Performing Privacy and
Gender in Early Modern
Literature
Mary E. Trull
palgrave
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© Mary E. Trull 2013
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For Adrian, Sadie, and Isaac
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Contents
List of Tables and Figures viii

Acknowledgments ix
1 Performing Privacy and Early Modern Women 1

2 Private Lament in Calvin, Knox, and Anne Lock 20
3 Privacy and Gender in Household Orders 52
4 Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well:
Mastery and Publicity 84
5 Marriage and Private Lament in Mary Wroth’s Urania 112
6 Interest and Retirement in Aphra Behn’s Odes 145
7 Epilogue: Performing Privacy on Facebook 172
Notes 178
Works Cited 210

Index 228
vii
List of Tables and Figures
Tables
1.1 Views of Privacy 7
Figures
2.1 George Joye, transl., The Psalter of David in English [1544],

A1v–A2r. Reproduced by kind permission of the Rare
Book & Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign. 43
2.2 Catholic Church, This Prymer of Salisbury Use, 1533,
Classmark: Syn.8.53.97, O4r. Reproduced by kind
permission of the Syndics of Cambridge
University Library. 45
2.3 Church of England, The Primer, Set Foorth by the Kynges
Maiestie and his Clergie, 1545, Classmark: Syn.7.54.46,
H4v. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of
Cambridge University Library. 46
3.1 Anthony van Dyck, George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham,
and Lord Francis Villiers, 1635. Supplied and reproduced
by kind permission of Royal Collection Trust.
© HM Queen Elizabeth II 2012. 67
3.2 Isaac Oliver, The Browne Brothers, 1598. Reproduced
by kind permission of the Burghley House Collection,
Lincolnshire. 68
3.3 Marc Duval, Les trois frères Coligny, 1579, Rothschild
Collection, Louvre Museum, Paris. © RMN (Musée du
Louvre) – © Thierry Ollivier. 72
viii
Acknowledgments
Over the years, I have benefited from the extraordinary generosity of

teachers, mentors, and fellow researchers. My first debt is to the faculty
of the University of Chicago, where this book had its genesis in a doc-
toral dissertation guided by David Bevington, Janel Mueller, and Joshua
Scodel, with much help from Richard Strier. I strive to emulate their
commitment to students and to literary scholarship.
Further research was graciously supported by a fellowship from the
American Council of Learned Societies and grants from the Huntington
Library and the Folger Shakespeare Library. My chapter on Aphra
Behn’s odes was inspired by a workshop led by Susan Stewart and sup-
ported by the National Center for the Humanities. An earlier version
of Chapter 4 was published in Translating Desire in Medieval and Early
Modern Literature, ed. Heather Hayton and Craig A. Berry (Medieval
and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2005), and a version of Chapter 5
appeared as “‘Philargus’ House Is Not in All Places”: Marriage, Privacy,
and the Overheard Lament in Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in ELR: English
Literary Renaissance 35 (2005). I thank the publishers and editors for
their willingness to promote the work of young scholars and for permis-
sion to reprint.
The community of scholars working on early modern women’s writing
has extended much kindness and rigorous attention to my work, to
my great benefit. I am grateful for many conversations and readings of
stages in this project, particularly from Karen Marsalek, Rich DuRocher,
the Carleton-St. Olaf Renaissance and Medieval Studies Colloquium, Katie
Larson, Rebecca Laroche, Mihoko Suzuki, Laura Engel, and Micheline
White. My thanks to all, and to my favorite and most skeptical reader,
Adrian Slobin.
Mary E. Trull
St. Olaf College
ix
1
Performing Privacy and Early
Modern Women
A privacy performed would, it seems, be a facsimile of true privacy.

However, the phrase prompts us to think about performance as consti-
tutive of privacy, and therefore pries open the apparently natural
opposition between “private” and “public.” For example, applying the
notion of “performing privacy” to authorship and publication usefully
complicates the meaning of becoming “public.” We think of entry
into the public sphere as a defining moment in which a text, released
from the immediate control of its author, risks scrutiny and judgment.
Harold Love defines publication as “a movement from a private realm
of creativity to a public realm of consumption.”1 This notion of publi-
cation as a movement between two discrete and well-defined realms
has seemed particularly appropriate for early modern women’s writing,
which is often marked as transgressive.2 Since women’s rare appearances
in print violated the period’s explicit gender norms, women’s publica-
tion appears as a moment of liberation in which the writer escapes, in
her authorial persona at least, her imprisonment in the domestic cares
of the private realm. The work that follows proposes that the early
modern public/private boundary was the site of both discipline and self-
creation for women; and that rather than separating two fully distinct
realms, the boundary was flexible and dynamic, open to new definition
with each author’s work. The phrase “performing privacy” designates
the transition from privacy to publicity as a performance, one that
defines both poles of the binary at the same time as it reveals them as
mutually constitutive.
The idea of performing privacy focuses critical attention on authorship
by rejecting the assumption that either manuscript or print publication
is definitively public. Consider Lady Mary Wroth, a seventeenth-century
English noblewoman who circulated her poetry within select Jacobean
1
2 Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature
court circles.3 Wroth’s gender and social position entailed social pressures
not to write for the public at large, but to present herself as a decorous
ornament to the court: a dancer in masques, a player of the lute, and
a writer of occasional verses offered as gifts to acquaintances (roles
that she both praises and satirizes in her prose romance The Countess
of Montgomery’s Urania).4 By Hannah Arendt’s criteria, Wroth’s poetry
is private, since the public is the “common world,” the “common
meeting ground of all,” where “being seen and heard by others derive
their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a
different position.” Private life, in contrast, offers “only the prolonga-
tion or multiplication of one’s own position with its attending aspects
and perspectives.”5 Wroth’s court-centered writing seems to be not an
encounter with diverse points of view in the “common world,” but
a collection of personal missives that both critique and reproduce aris-
tocratic culture. In another sense, though, Wroth’s limited or “private”
circulation might constitute an initial step in the creation of a public,
fitting Nancy Fraser’s stress on counterpublics that, while aimed at
a limited audience, encompass wider aspirations. In Fraser’s terms,
Wroth’s address to a small group could be seen as a tactical withdrawal,
part of a long-term strategy to “disseminate one’s discourse to ever
widening arenas.”6 Wroth’s manuscript poetry is private by Arendt’s
definition, but public by Fraser’s.
Further complications are offered by the print publication in 1621
of Urania. We might consider print publication as an assurance that a
text has entered the public realm; yet Urania seems to aim not for the
“common world” in Arendt’s terms, but for coterie status.7 Its title marks
it as a personal text meant for one special reader, Wroth’s neighbor and
kinswoman Susan Vere, Countess of Montgomery. Moreover, the con-
tent of the romance makes private circulation appropriate: it is a roman
à clef half-concealing passionate feelings under pseudonyms and veiled
allusions, and Wroth claimed that the manuscript was printed against
her will.8 Given its various gestures towards privacy, should we consider
Urania as part of an emergent public sphere? If the answer is “yes” for
the printed Part One, then what of the never-published Part Two, which
may well have been written with the same expectations as Part One,
although it met with a different fate? Mary Wroth’s example suggests
the extent to which the boundary between public and private in the
early modern period was both performative and dynamic; each author
renegotiated the terms and placement of this boundary through acts
of self-representation such as means of publication, paratexts, and
stand-ins for the author and audience within the text. Since the
Performing Privacy and Early Modern Women 3
dominant early modern religious and philosophical traditions limited

women’s public roles, women writers in particular provoked their con-
temporaries to confront questions about who could count as a public
person and what kind of discourse belonged to public space.
The early modern public/private boundary was a key fault line, as
Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin have argued, defining the concepts
of both the person and the world; however, its borders were continually
in flux.9 Although I approach the meaning of “private” and “public” as
dynamic terms rather than a stable dichotomy, Wilson and Yachnin’s
definition captures the general opposition that I seek to convey with
these slippery terms: what is public is “open to others and potentially
boundless in its effects,” while what is private is restricted to one or
a few persons.10 The real force of the terms, I will argue, lies in the
concrete visions of private and public relations sketched out by early
modern authors, for whom the private sphere could mean isolated con-
templation, domestic family life, intimate friendship, or self-interested
commercial relations.11 In tracing a course through the shifting waters
of “private” and “public,” I emphasize the crucial importance for
early modern writers of defining the public/private boundaries of two
elements: form and gender.
In order to attend to form and gender in early modern literature,
Performing Privacy and Gender ranges across a variety of genres, focusing
on women authors, “public” women, and tropes of privacy and over-
hearing. I draw examples from devotional and secular lyric poetry in
chapters on Anne Lock’s sonnets and Aphra Behn’s panegyric poetry,
from drama (Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well), prose fiction
(Montemayor’s Diana, Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Mary Wroth’s Urania),
and a non-literary genre: household orders. This range of genres allows
me to compare how formal conventions shape privacy, authority, and
gender in many kinds of texts. I analyze the work of each woman author
in the context of her immediate literary influences, male and female,
as well as her place in a developing tradition of women’s writing.
Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well provides an instructive contrast
to the works by women authors, since both the play and the ballads
that it references focus on the desire of private persons to enter the
public eye. Comparing female narrators of ballads to Shakespeare’s
female and male lamenters reveals how women’s authorship was repre-
sented through tropes of overhearing and violated privacy. I also use
the non-literary genre of household orders to cast light on privacy and
aristocratic households. Contrasting imaginative or literary visions of
privacy with the privacy negotiated in household orders produces a fuller
understanding of the context within which writers like Aphra Behn and
Mary Wroth represented aristocratic women and their servants.
Performing Privacy and Gender attends to literary form as an important
influence on the development of ideas about public and private. I show
how authors used form, including genre, intertextuality, typology, tropes,
and imagery, as a resource to create new possibilities for women’s repre-
sentation as public persons. Recently, critical theorists have emphasized
the creative power of public discourse to re-envision the social world,
a process that Michael Warner calls “poetic world-making.”12 Writing
calls a public into being by addressing an implied audience that is both
specific and open-ended, as Warner writes: “Public discourse says not
only ‘Let a public exist’ but ‘Let it have this character, speak this way, see
the world in this way’. It then goes in search of confirmation that such
a public exists, with greater or lesser success.”13 Public speech does its
work not only by advancing propositions through rational debate, but
also by performances that model the public/private distinction while
enacting it. Therefore, public speech relies on formal and aesthetic
qualities. Warner’s “poetic world-making,” like Benedict Anderson’s
“imagined communities” and Cornelius Castoriadis’s “social imagi-
nary,” highlights how the public/private boundary appears through
creative, aesthetic, and embodied expression.14 As my emphasis on style
as well as affects and ethics suggests, this book situates imagined publics
in their literary contexts, seeking to understand how genre and form
delineate public/private borders, even as the dialectic between public
and private helps to shape literary form.
I bring to special notice the “private” woman made public in order
to examine privacy’s diverse contexts and connotations, women’s pub-
lication as authors, and women’s equally tendentious appearances as
subjects of public writing. In particular, I focus on tropes of overhearing,
which dramatize the publication of what was, or ought to have been,
private. Scenes of overhearing, in which one character eavesdrops on
another’s private meditation (often in verse), are a prominent feature of
early English prose fiction and drama.15 My investigation of overhearing
tropes reveals authors playing with conventions about gender and
privacy and staging the violation of those conventions. Overhearing
often brings into question the subject’s agency in becoming public.
Did he or she stage this revelation, or inadvertently suffer exposure?
What are the appropriate affects for subject, overhearer, and audience –
shame, anger, desire, sympathy? When does overhearing or being
overheard signal a breach in the social fabric, and when does it create
new social ties? In early modern works, I argue, overhearing is often a
frame through which authors interrogate the meaning of privacy and its
social, sexual, devotional, and political dimensions. Each performance
of privacy through overheard lament conjures up a public with a
distinctive style that evokes specific affects and establishes an ethics for
relations between audiences and performers.
The trope of overhearing often intersects in early modern literature
with a form strongly marked by gender: the complaint or lament.
Tracing abandoned women’s laments from Sappho to Anna Akhmatova,
Lawrence Lipking treats lamenting women as critically neglected
mirror images of literature’s male heroes. He notes that the etymology
of “abandon” means both “submission to power” and “freedom from
bondage”: “This verbal duplicity hints at the roots of power beneath the
desolation of abandoned women – are they chattels or do they belong
to themselves? – as well as the uneasiness with which most cultures
regard them. Those who are banished are also let loose; utter surrender
resembles utter freedom.”16 Lamenting women are licensed to critique
not only their abusers but the larger world that produced their pain, a
conjoining of cultivated affect and barbed social commentary that has
drawn male and female authors to speak through these figures for mil-
lennia. In The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality
in American Culture, Lauren Berlant notes that female complaints are
characteristic of women’s culture in twentieth-century fiction and film.
She identifies women’s culture as an “intimate public,” a mass market
that reflects the experiences and desires of a group of consumers who
“feel as though it expresses what is common among them,” creating
strong identification with an imagined community while obscuring the
role of commercial interests in creating that social space.17 The laments
that I study also invoke a community of the injured and treat women as
archetypes of unjust suffering. Like twentieth-century women’s culture,
early modern literature spotlights the spectacle of an abused woman’s
affect-laden rhetoric as a register of the costs of the ordinary injustices of
patriarchal society. The figure of the lamenting woman then becomes
representative of the experiences of marginalized groups such as radical
Protestants (see Chapter 2) and, later, disaffected Royalists (see Chapter 6).
The twentieth-century laments in Berlant’s The Female Complaint aim
at well-defined demographic slices typical of modern marketing strate-
gies. In contrast, I will show that the attempts of early modern writers
to envision an “intimate public” of women are both fragmentary and
ambivalent.18
In pastoral romance and drama, the overheard laments of female
characters are touchstones for the possibility of authentic feeling
unmediated by art, constructing what I call an “erotics of authenticity.”

The lamenter’s privacy signals the expression of authentic feeling, while the
presence of an eavesdropper dramatizes the pleasure of piercing the veil
of an author’s privacy. When the lamenting poet is a woman, the inter-
loper’s pleasure becomes more explicitly scopophilic, and authors draw
implicit parallels between the spectacle of a woman’s body in dishabille
and the revelation of her feelings in poetry. In so doing, these writers
suggest that poetry offers readers a unique, and even voyeuristic, insight
into private feelings, as we see in Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 2 provides
an instructive contrast to the explicitly erotic laments in prose, drama,
and ballads by focusing on Anne Lock’s verse paraphrase of Psalm 51.
Devotional poetry often relies on the reader’s role as eavesdropper on
a scene of private confession, but such poems rarely foreground the
voyeuristic aspect of this relationship. Lock’s imitation of King David,
I argue, differs from most other psalm imitations by reminding the
reader of King David’s own role as voyeur and suggesting that the
penitential psalm could be a vehicle for Bathsheba’s lament as well as
David’s. I show that the themes of voyeurism and authenticity unite
portrayals of female lamenters, from Anne Lock’s penitential sonnets of
1560 to Aphra Behn’s panegyric poetry of the 1680s. Focusing on over-
hearing and laments in many kinds of texts shows how articulations
of women’s privacy helped to shape a wide range of genres: devotional
poetry, political poetry, romance, drama, and ballads.
Early modern England was a crucible in which several radically trans-
formative and historically significant concepts of privacy swirled together.
Performing Privacy and Gender focuses on four of these models: two
influential classical models and two that emerged in the course of the
seventeenth century. Aristotle viewed the private as the domestic realm,
in which basic needs are satisfied, while some early modern uses of
the word “private” evoke an ideal of intimate friendship linked to the
writing of Plato and Cicero. In early modern England, a new current
of thought idealizing the domestic family contrasted with the view of
the market as a private realm. In all four models, domestic forms of pri-
vacy contrast with extradomestic forms. Similarly, the private realm is in
two models idealized as a source of freedom and emotional satisfaction,
and in the other two depicted as a domain of necessity offering neither
true pleasure nor freedom. Table 1.1 sketches out these oppositions;
shaded areas indicate the classical influence on early modern England
and unshaded areas denote emergent concepts of privacy.
Classical portrayals of the family, the household, and the private/
public boundary were widely quoted and imitated in early modern
Table 1.1 Views of Privacy
Domestic privacy Extradomestic privacy
Privacy as freedom The modern family Ciceronian friendship

Privacy as mere The Aristotelean The market in liberal
necessity household economics
England, especially Aristotle’s view of the family as the domain of

necessity and the Ciceronian ideal of friendship. Early modern writers
were familiar with Aristotle’s Politics, in which the family, “the asso-
ciation established by nature for the supply of men’s everyday wants,”
contrasts with the state, which aims at the highest good, the flourishing
of true human excellence.19 Thus in Aristotle’s model, political life guar-
antees both freedom and authenticity; there, men are liberated from
basic necessities and free to deliberate on the nature of justice. Since
man is a “political animal,” in Aristotle’s phrase, in politics men express
their “natural” selves, achieving the ultimate end for which nature
has equipped men.20 Mapping the concepts of “private” and “public”
onto Aristotle’s division between oikos and polis provided early modern
English readers with a rationale for subordinating private to public
life. The etymology of “private” implies restriction or privation; when
applied to objects, the Latin privatus suggests individual property, and
when applied to persons, it indicates one who does not hold an office.21
Hannah Arendt has influentially argued that classical privacy suggests
privation or lack rather than freedom: “Privacy [before the modern age]
was like the other, the dark and hidden side of the public realm,” unfree
because ruled by necessity.22
The passionate friendship described in Cicero’s De Amicitia supplied
another important model for early modern privacy. Such a friendship,
conceived as a natural impulse of attraction based on mutual recogni-
tion of virtue rather than any material benefit, offered a powerful ideal
in the early modern age, when birth and family so rigorously determined
one’s fate. In theory, Ciceronian friendship was a purer alternative to
the networks of kin and allies usually referred to as one’s “friends.”
Significantly, the etymology of “private” also points to intimacies unbound
by family life. In post-classical Latin found in British sources from the
eighth to the fourteenth centuries, privatus also meant “close, intimate …
confidential” or, as a noun, “close friend, confidant” (OED s. v. “private,”
etymology). The logic of the early modern use of “privy” is similar: as an
adjective, it could mean “private, personal; familiar, acquainted,” and
applied to a person, “intimate or familiar … trusted; belonging to one’s

close circle of friends or companions” (OED A.I., A.I.1a); thus “privy”
was applied to many contexts involving secret or hidden behavior.
Both contemporary and early modern literature construct privacy as a
pleasurable freedom from certain kinds of observation, but this early
modern sense of “privacy” indicates the shared freedom of familiarity
rather than the freedom of isolation. This meaning of “privacy,” as a
privileged confidentiality with another person, has become obsolete,
as has the early modern use of “private” for the person with whom it is
shared.23 Now we would use “an intimate” and “intimacy” – “a close,
familiar, and usually affectionate or loving relation with another person
or group,” or “the quality of being comfortable, warm, or familiar.”24
These neglected word usages suggest that we may locate early modern
privacy not only in the family, property ownership, or the subject’s
oppositional relation to the state, but in friendship, personal servitude,
patronage/clientage, or other modes of familiarity within public realms.
We will see such visions of privacy in Anne Lock’s penitential prayers,
in Mary Wroth’s shared laments, in Lady Jane Berkeley’s directions to
servants, and in Aphra Behn’s panegyrics.
The newly idealized private family would by the eighteenth century
become a central cultural preoccupation. There, in theory, members
experienced freedom from social artifice and the liberty of self-
expression, especially the expression of emotion and affection. Lauren
Berlant speaks of the family in post-Victorian Anglo-American culture as
a “fantasy” of a “place of sociability in which flow, intimacy, and iden-
tification across difference can bridge life across generations and model
intimate sociability for the social generally.”25 As I will discuss below,
some historians consider seventeenth-century England the birthplace of
the idealized private family. Lena Cowen Orlin’s recent work provides an
important correction, however, to the notion that the Reformation and
increasing state centralization awakened a desire for privacy that then
drove massive changes in architectural and social space. She emphasizes
the profit elites derived from public surveillance of individual lives,
showing that to a degree, “society organized itself around the principle
of preventing privacy. Curiosity was authorized – indeed, mandated – as
a condition of order.”26 Crucially, Orlin argues that aspects of the
Great Rebuilding of England enhanced communal surveillance rather
than increasing privacy. Her work reveals that the notion of a bur-
geoning private sphere was largely fictive, especially in aristocratic
households and crowded urban dwellings. For my purposes, Orlin’s
argument underlines the sense in which the representation of privacy
in the period was performative, a spectacle for public consumption

rather than a protective gesture walling off the family from the wider
social world.
While privacy became increasingly linked to marriage and domes-
ticity, the new liberal economics envisioned the market as a private
sphere, offering participants freedom from state control and liberty to
pursue their private interests. These contrasting concepts of privacy
are interdependent: the proto-liberal idealization of individual inter-
ests theoretically denied a place in commercial relations to sociability,
networks of obligation, personal commitments, and their attendant
affects, such as sympathy and affection. In such an ideology, affective
relations must belong elsewhere. The idealization of the family circle
painted commerce as harsh, competitive, and even dehumanizing; only
in the family could personal relations flourish and only there could one
express one’s “true self.” Although these modes of thought complement
one another, they also provide sharply dissonant versions of what it
means to be private and what kind of freedom privacy offers. Private
interests pursued in commerce are self-centered, while the private
experience of family life is social and emotional. This ideal contrasts
markedly with Aristotle’s teaching; as we can see, sharply discordant
views of the family as a private social space characterized seventeenth-
century England.
The above survey demonstrates that the affects and ethics proper to
privacy and publicity varied enormously in the early modern period.
Privacy could belong to the household, the family, friendship, the
market, or the prayer closet; it could offer freedom or restriction, the
glorious expansiveness of mutual affection or the rational calculation of
personal gain. Early modern discourse often envisioned women’s privacy
through extradomestic space. While scholars have noted the multiple
meanings of early modern privacy, literary criticism largely continues to
limit the topic of women and privacy to the social space of the home.27
Yet privacy’s political, religious, scholarly, and social connotations are
equally relevant to women’s roles. At court, privacy could signify the
limitation of access to power to a select few, or, alternatively, the con-
spiratorial secrecy of the disaffected. For the Humanist movement, an
image like Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving of Erasmus of Rotterdam
in private study represented an implicit critique of the worldliness that
leads to state and church corruption. Similarly, Protestants considered
private reading of the Bible a defining experience for the “new religion.”
How women’s roles were defined in relation to these models of privacy
demands greater attention, as do relations among different scenes of
privacy. Performing Privacy and Gender examines the meanings of privacy

for women in Protestant devotion, in networks of intimate friendships,
and in the contexts of status distinction and political power.
Thinking about privacy in terms of non-familial intimacy highlights
affective relations within hierarchies, and thus helps to capture forms
of sociability that predate the “affective individualism” that Lawrence
Stone confines to the nuclear family.28 Stone argued that as the nuclear
family became more important, relations within it grew more equal and
the hierarchical relations of extended kinship and friendship networks
took a secondary place in individuals’ affective lives. Like the ideal-
ized family circle, non-familial “private” relations are characterized by
intense emotional ties; but as more exclusive, one-on-one familiarities,
they also may impart freedom from observation and judgment. From
the perspective of non-familial intimacy, all spaces outside the privi-
leged haven of exclusive affection are public, including the household,
family, and court – even marriage. I will argue that in Wroth’s Urania and
Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, both privacy and publicity are
complex in their marking of early modern marriage and the household.
Moreover, like the private sphere of economic self-interest, this kind of
privacy does not divorce itself from material gain, but may even, in the
context of service or patronage, mix the prospect of material rewards
with the pleasures of freedom and affection. Furthermore, the model
of hierarchical intimacy helps us to understand prayer as a key to early
modern thinking about privacy. For Anne Lock, as Chapter 2 argues,
prayer is not a private space of isolated introspection, but one of familiar
intimacy that allows her to imagine a public of godly petitioners in
private communion with God.
In order to address publicity and privacy as complexly interrelated
ideas rather than a simple dichotomy, I rely on developments in
critical theory since the 1989 English translation of Jürgen Habermas’s
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. These developments
direct our attention to how a public includes and excludes potential
speakers, how the public is related to privacy, and how marginalized or
oppositional voices create their own publics. These concerns require a
summary of relevant debates in critical theory. Habermas’s foundational
work explores how the public/private border could be a site of ambiguity
and change, yet retain its conceptual force. He locates an emerging
public sphere in late seventeenth-century England within the private
realm. Both the intimate sphere of the family and the new public sphere
to which it gave birth were marked by, in Habermas’s phrase, “privateness
oriented toward an audience.”29 Like “performing privacy,” this
Habermasian label confounds our understanding of “private” and

“public”: here, privacy seeks, rather than evades, exposure. By “privacy,”
Habermas denotes a new sense of the self cultivated in the “intimate
sphere” of the newly private family, based on participation in a loving
community valuing self-cultivation above all, a voluntary community
in which a “pure” or “common” humanity rather than a status-based
hierarchy flourished. The bourgeois public sphere, then, grew out of a
specific concept of private life, in which the individual (paradigmati-
cally, the male head of a household) experienced freedom and intimacy
within a family circle that dedicated itself to literature, ethical reflection,
and self-improvement. The freedom promised by membership in such
an intimate sphere seemed to allow the expression of a more authentic
version of the self. In other words, for Habermas, freedom and authentic
selfhood attained new meaning through the perception of the intimate
sphere of the family as a private sphere opposed to public life. The
bourgeois public sphere was therefore composed of individuals who
saw themselves as private persons, persons whose common humanity,
cultivated within the family, justified their participation as equals in
rational debate.
Responses to Habermas’s work included feminist critics who argued that
the bourgeois public sphere’s exclusion of women was not contingent
on its historical context but constitutive, an exclusion integral to the
very idea of a public sphere grounded in, yet defining itself in opposi-
tion to, the intimate sphere of domestic life. The public realm’s claim
to universality and the rule of reason required relegating difference
and emotion to a newly subordinated and feminized private sphere.
Joan Landes, for example, perceived a silencing of women’s voices
as salon culture was replaced by a print-based public sphere in post-
revolutionary France.30 Therefore, feminist scholars have argued for
the simultaneous development of a plurality of public spheres, each
characterized by different modes of inclusion and exclusion. The early
modern division between public and private now appears more flexible
and amenable to manipulation than in Habermas’s first formulation.31
Critics led by Nancy Fraser argue that since the seventeenth century,
multiple publics have been in conflict with one another and have wres-
tled with both “public” and “private” concerns. The bourgeois public,
Fraser claims, competes with subaltern counterpublics that represent
the interests of marginalized groups. Such counterpublics provide
those who fail to qualify as members of the bourgeois public with
“spaces of withdrawal and regroupment … they also function as bases
and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider
publics.”32 Subaltern counterpublics may productively deliberate on

“private interests” rather than the “common good” to which Habermas
restricts discourse in the bourgeois public sphere. This vision of a public
sphere coexisting with multiple counterpublics fundamentally revises
Habermas’s public sphere, which is nested securely within, yet clearly
distinguished from, the private sphere. Counterpublic theory allows
us to see “private” and “public” as a dynamic, continually contested
relationship in which publics in the process of self-creation define the
private/public divide differently.
Counterpublic theory replaces the notion of a neutral public, in which
participants leave specific identities behind, with publics that both
create and affirm characteristic styles of behavior and social interaction –
features of social life often labeled “private.” While for Habermas the
public must carefully abjure any specific style in order to enthrone
reason, Michael Warner notes that even an “impartial” style nevertheless
“elaborates (and masks as unmarked humanity) a particular culture, its
way of life, its reading practices, its ethical conventions, its geography,
its class and gender dispositions, and its economic organization.”33 The
specificity of public cultures is not, for Warner, solely a mode of exclusion;
it also allows Warner’s “poetic world-making” – a public articulates a
world and way of being and by doing so calls it into existence, but also
puts its own specificity at risk by opening itself to “just anyone.” By
addressing itself to a theoretically unlimited audience, public speech
both assumes its audience’s existence and strives to create a determi-
nate culture. Warner refers to this paradox as the “fruitful perversity”
of publics; thus, like Habermas, he sees public speech as a generator
of transformation (113). Unlike Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere,
counterpublics embrace a particular style, acknowledge or even ground
themselves on the idea of private experience, and consciously define
themselves in opposition to a dominant culture or regime.34 Performing
Privacy and Gender focuses on the affects of performers and publics, the
ethical consequences of venturing into the public, and the styles of
utterance and visions of community evoked by invented publics.
In the last 25 years, while critical theory developed new models for
understanding the private/public distinction, early modern literary
scholarship saw New Historicism and feminist criticism marking out
divisions over the early modern history of privacy. According to New
Historicist narratives, the new freedoms of privacy in the intimate
sphere and in spaces of isolated contemplation provoked a recognition
of interiority as the basis of selfhood. While New Historicism addressed
the modern concept of privacy as a partner to new configurations of
subjectivity, feminist critics in the main treated private and public

spheres as two poles of a rigid dichotomy and focused on how women,
although officially confined to the private sphere, succeeded or failed
in achieving a public “voice.” In feminist criticism the private sphere
signified the oppression of women and silencing of their voices. Elaine
Beilin defines the problem:
… while everything encouraged educated men to be public servants,

the continued insistence that the virtuous woman was private,
domestic, and silent was an acknowledged difficulty for many writers
who wished to address an audience. Perhaps many women writers
specifically invoked a female audience partly out of legitimate sym-
pathy, but partly to camouflage their public voice, to pretend that
addressing other women was not really taking on the world. More
important, the social injunctions also produced a recognizable and
sometimes articulated feminine decorum, the adherence to subjects,
images, and language that conformed to the type of the virtuous
woman. Yet, in their very restrictions, women would discover their
voice and their art.35
Implicit in Beilin’s classic formulation is a view of the public sphere

as an arena of importance and freedom; addressing a universal public
amounts to “taking on the world,” whereas addressing other women
is a cautious, conformist stratagem. Feminist criticism of the 1980s
highlights the private sphere’s confining and stifling effect on women’s
voices. Similarly, the turn in the 1990s towards cultural criticism repre-
sented the early modern family as a primary guarantor of public order,
a role that would have invested household relations with intense desire
and anxiety. Heather Dubrow sums up the conflicts surrounding the
idea of home by remarking that “early modern households, ostensibly
associated with tranquil stasis, were in fact profoundly unstable materi-
ally and ideologically.”36 Certainly, Tudor and Stuart drama and fiction
put the lie to the kindly, wise patriarchs and cheerfully subordinate
women and servants portrayed by early modern household advice
books; if the orderly families of prescriptive literature reflect cultural
desires, the violent and lustful families of Jacobean tragedy display
the anxiety that accompanies these desires. While these dichotomies
(public/private, desire/anxiety, order/disorder, voice/silence) have
enriched feminist analysis, the dystopic private sphere lacks nuance.
We need an account of how gender inflects an array of experiences that
may have both private and public aspects. Counterpublic theory offers
a welcome movement beyond dichotomies by showing that a public

can constitute itself through discourse marked “private” while also, in
Beilin’s terms, “taking on the world.”
Responding in part to counterpublic theory, recent feminist literary
critics have emphasized how women writers manipulated symbols of
privacy and publicity to re-envision and justify their crossing of that
border. Katharine Gillespie argues that female English sectarian writers
of the seventeenth century assumed the right to critique state authority
by designating religious expression a private matter outside the state’s
domain.37 These women’s public discourse emerged from a nominally
private position. Similarly, Catharine Gray maintains that women
writers deployed experiences marked as private both as staging grounds
and as “ideological model[s]” for new forms of public debate.38 Thus, the
rhetorical relegation of women to private spaces actually allowed them
to play distinctive roles in the vigorous seventeenth-century growth of
politically active counterpublics by wielding the rhetoric of privacy to
mark off oppositional political spaces. The work of Gray and Gillespie
shows that women exploited the domestic markers of their own subjec-
tion to assert their separateness from the public sphere of authority, but
also to ground their right to speak in public as private persons.
I explore how gender inflects privacy in a range of imagined publics:
Anne Lock’s godly public, the publics imagined by household orders,
Mary Wroth’s public of illicit lovers, and Aphra Behn’s aristocratic public.
Although Lock and Behn support visible counterpublics – the Calvinist
movement and the Tory party, respectively – they do not envision
themselves as spokeswomen or their works as explicit interventions in
a public debate. Instead, each author’s assumption of a “public” role as
author is highly ambivalent: Lock writes anonymously, the writers of
household orders seek privacy, Wroth depicts herself through avatars,
and Behn portrays herself as politically isolated. The publics they evoke,
like the “invisible” church of Calvinist theology, exist in the minds
of believers rather than in letters or meetings. Some women authors
envision publics as utopian alternatives to the status quo, whether the
dominant ideology is the Elizabethan church settlement, as for Lock;
dynastic marriage, as for Wroth; or Whig proto-liberalism, as for Behn.
They use scenes of privacy to assert the exclusiveness, freedom, and
authenticity of their protagonists’ marginalized experiences by reclaim-
ing a subject position rejected by the dominant culture. My chapter
on household orders puts the imagined aristocratic privacy in Wroth,
Shakespeare, and Behn in conversation with the voices of women
aristocrats who attempt to frame their own privacy within the household.
By arranging ranks of servants at carefully negotiated degrees of proximity,

these women writers perform privacy before an imagined public in order
to confirm their mastery of others and their status as aristocrats.
My second chapter, “Private Lament in Calvin, Knox, and Anne
Lock,” sets Lock’s verse paraphrase of the 51st psalm in the context of
Reformation psalm commentaries and sixteenth-century English prayer
books. As John Calvin and John Knox saw it, the genre of the individual
lament, which included Psalm 51 (the Miserere mei Deus), is centrally
concerned with King David’s emergence from private sin to a confession
both private (as an intimate colloquy with God) and public (as a model
for ordinary sinners’ penitence). However, Calvin and Knox differed on
the rhetorical style appropriate to an individual lament: Knox argued
that the lamenter should proudly challenge God to fulfill his promise
of grace using a wild, even pugilistic style, while Calvin urged a shame-
faced and self-contained style as the mark of the sinner’s admission of
fault. Lock draws on both to position herself as a performer of privacy:
her speaker hovers between hiding and revealing his or her fault. For
Lock, privacy must be performed both to reform the speaker’s heart and
to unify the “invisible church” of reformed believers. In these sonnets,
secrecy develops from a cancerous tumor of sin to a “secret wisdom”
that brings holy insight into the self. The “secret wisdom” granted by
God gives the penitent the power to join believers in a communion of
individuals both isolated among the ungodly and imaginatively joined
with the godly in sympathetic suffering, by displaying in verse his or
her secret self. While the speaker of Psalm 51 was traditionally identified
as David, Lock suggests that her model penitent could be either David
or Bathsheba, who was depicted in English prayer books as the tempt-
ress whose public exposure while bathing provoked David to adultery
and murder. Lock draws on allusions to sexual pollution appropriate to
David, but also on images of maternity and cookery more appropriate
to a feminine speaker. Her sonnet sequence thus becomes a meditation
on the form of lament and several kinds of emergence from privacy to
publicity: the “sin” of female exposure, the role of public confession in
justification, and the rhetoric appropriate to intimacy with God.
The third chapter, “Privacy and Gender in Household Orders,”
examines a genre of “private” or domestic writing that circulated largely
in manuscript. Household orders began in the medieval period as lists
of instructions for servants prescribing proper ceremonies for special
occasions in noble or royal households. In the seventeenth century,
however, these lists change, becoming elaborate justifications of social
hierarchy and instruction manuals on courtesy and master–servant
relations. Household orders provide a detailed view of how privacy was

textually constructed and negotiated within aristocratic households.
Moreover, the construction of privacy in household orders is pro-
foundly concerned with gender. Household orders call upon a nostalgic
vision of the medieval household as a virtuous, loyal, all-male commu-
nity built on martial values. At the same time, their requirements for
servants to behave as gentlemen of leisure reveal the obsolescence of
this medieval model. This chapter compares a particularly rhetorically
complex set of household orders by Anthony Browne, third Viscount
Montague, with Isaac Oliver’s portrait of the viscount with his brothers
and a servant. Both works are calculated performances of privacy that
represent the Montague household as a virtuous Catholic community
rather than a martial threat to Queen Elizabeth’s Protestant settlement.
Furthermore, a few extant household orders by women present striking
counterpoints to the masculine privacy depicted by male-authored
orders. Queen Henrietta Maria, Lady Jane Berkeley, and Elizabeth,
Lady Compton direct the behavior of gentlemen servants who act as a
frame for their mistress’s privacy before the public eye. The dynamics
of privacy and exposure evident in women’s household orders provide
context for the representations of women as mistresses and servants in
the following two chapters.
Chapter 4, “Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well: Mastery and
Publicity,” looks at the gendering of social ambition, figured as a move-
ment from “private” to “public” life. Here, the aristocratic household
is a space where ambitious servants rise (or fall) by seeking “public”
roles. I begin with public women represented in fallen-women ballads,
in which a female speaker laments her abandonment by a lover. This
genre, I argue, influenced the depiction of Shakespeare’s heroine Helena
in All’s Well That Ends Well. Seen in the context of these ballads, All’s
Well confronts the costs and rewards of a woman becoming a public
actor. All’s Well depicts a household combining the privacy of selective
intimacy – and its rewards of free expression and relative tolerance –
with social monitoring. In crossing the household’s boundary into the
public sphere, ambitious dependents access new possibilities for reward,
while risking a range of punishing forms of exposure. I draw a parallel
between the career of Helena as an ambitious gentlewoman-in-waiting
and that of the gentleman-servant Parolles. As characters move from
the household to the court, they fend off possible humiliation by sup-
plying their own generic frameworks for interpretation; Helena blocks
comparisons to fallen ballad heroines by invoking the female knights
of romance. The play examines the complex dynamics of identification,
sympathy, and hostility between an audience and public women, in this

case history’s quasi-mythical heroines and the stage heroines played by
boy actors.
Chapter 5, “Marriage and Private Lament in Mary Wroth’s Urania,”
shows how women characters played a central role in defining both
poetic expression and privacy in pastoral romance. From Jacopo
Sannazaro to Philip Sidney, pastoral romances foregrounded the spec-
tacle of the lamenting woman. The violation of a female lamenter’s
privacy constructs privacy as the setting for authentic emotion, while
the exposed woman’s shame proves that poetic laments are authentic
expressions of feeling. Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania
deconstructs the tradition of overheard laments through satire, expos-
ing the voyeuristic aspect of overheard laments and the artifice that
eroticizes the woman author’s entrance into public view. Wroth locates
the privacy in which her female poets lament in complex relation
to the marital household, which each marital partner experiences as
a public space of scrutiny and judgment. The extra-domestic proprie-
tary spaces in which Wroth’s female characters seek a sympathetic
audience prefigure the “intimate publics” that Lauren Berlant locates
in twentieth-century America.39 Wroth’s scenes of overheard lament
transform the meaning of privacy by combining the erotic space of
privacy in pastoral romance with the social realism of abandoned
women’s laments in the ballad tradition. Wroth’s Urania places immense
value in women’s resistance to publicity, but also stages the overcom-
ing of such reluctance in overheard laments that allow the exposure
of heroines’ secret desires, much as the romance itself, a roman à clef,
exposed its author.
My sixth chapter turns to the end of the seventeenth century, when
civil war, the restored monarchy, and a new articulation of political
opposition created fresh possibilities for understanding the meaning
of “the public.” At the same time, the new prominence of women on
stage generated controversy about women’s public roles. Unlike Anne
Lock or Mary Wroth, Aphra Behn presented herself as a public woman,
an unabashedly ambitious commoner along the lines of Shakespeare’s
Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well. Yet Behn also imagined a retreat
from public view in her panegyric poems. This chapter, “Interest and
Retirement in Aphra Behn’s Odes,” explores poems in which the theme
of retreat reveals a complex approach to the spectacular politics of the
monarchy. As a Tory propagandist and apologist for the monarchy, Behn
contests the Whig view of private and public virtue. She satirizes the
Whig notion of public virtue founded on private, rational self-interest,
while praising a different meaning of “interest”: an affective tie of mutual

social obligations between social superiors and their inferiors. Behn’s
model of “interest” erases the Whig distinction between public and
private virtues. Instead of a proto-liberal vision of a commonweal
governed by self-interest, she offers a view of the nation as a feudal
household structured by hierarchical personal ties of loyalty and affec-
tion. Still, Behn’s narrator-figures model not only a powerful affective
reaction to the monarch as a public object, but also an urge to reject
the public’s undifferentiated delight in spectacle in favor of a more self-
critical and discriminating response. Thus, her apparently univocally
flattering poems actually record ambivalence towards the notion of the
monarch’s public status and the power differential between a glorious
public figure and an adoring crowd. Is the public person the apex of a
network of affective relations, inculcating virtue in his or her subjects
through a heroic presence? Or does this form of publicity abject and
dehumanize the audience of merely private persons that frames the
public person? Behn’s narrators sometimes deliberately retreat from
the glorious public spectacle of a heroic presence, exposing the consti-
tutive fictions of public authority. Through her lyric narrators we can
see that the move from private to public realms was not necessarily
liberatory; for her, private retreat signifies distance from the spectacular
fictions of monarchical politics. Her narrators’ movement into privacy
justifies her claim to a discriminating and critical authorial persona; she
sees behind the façade of spectacular politics because she is its creator.
Aphra Behn is a transitional figure who looks backwards to a nostalgic
feudal ideal and forwards towards the rising idealization of domestic
privacy and the private interest of eighteenth-century market economics.
This chapter thus closes my examination of early modern literature
and privacy by revealing early signs of the next century’s changing
configurations.
This book concludes with an epilogue, “Performing Privacy on
Facebook,” that compares early modern and post-modern configura-
tions of privacy. I move from defenses of privacy in twentieth-century
legal theory to the lively twenty-first-century debate on “lifestyle
transparency” and privacy protections on social networking websites.
As in the early modern era, in our time the meaning of privacy is under
pressure from changing technologies, forms of commerce, and political
regimes. I point towards similarities between the two periods in order
to suggest that performances of privacy are now shaping the formation
of electronic media, as they shaped print, manuscript, and the public
stage in the early modern period.
In what follows, I seek to make sense of the meaning of privacy for

early modern women in a period in which both privacy and publicity
were loaded with political, religious, domestic, and class significance.
In particular, women’s public exposure was the subject of intense scru-
tiny and criticism. Counterpublic theory allows us to think through
the concept of privacy without assuming that early modern “public”
women transitioned from a private sphere to a single, monolithic public
sphere, altering their status from “private” to “public”; that women’s
writing was inherently subversive; or, on the contrary, that an emer-
gent public sphere comfortably accommodated women. Admittedly,
neither Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere nor counterpublic theory is
entirely satisfactory, since both models abstract from the complexity of
real social worlds and the nuanced, frequently shifting relations among
writers and readers. Most texts implicitly or explicitly address a number
of distinct publics while also gesturing towards blurrier and more
distant horizons, such as posterity or humanity. Still, counterpublic
theory allows us to explore the key concept of privacy as it shapes public
discourse. It shows how the notion of privacy helps to ground relations
of dominance and subversion that fragment public discourse, as well as
how form and style infuse the public/private border. Most importantly,
counterpublic theory reveals the performative function that allows
writing repeatedly to define anew what it means to be private and public.
2
Private Lament in Calvin, Knox,
and Anne Lock
Historians often trace an emerging respect for privacy in early modern

Europe to the Reformation’s promotion of solitary Bible-reading and
prayer and the Counter-Reformation’s emphasis on private confession
and meditation. The new figure of devotion, according to this argu-
ment, was a solitary devotee bent in prayer or immersed in reading,
a contemplative form of privacy that helped to enshrine solitude as a
state more authentic and valuable than shared experience.1 This chapter
seeks to expand our understanding of the Reformation and “private”
devotion by interrogating the link between solitude and privacy in the
work of John Calvin, John Knox, and Anne Lock. Lock’s meditations on
the theology of private laments and the variously gendered masks that
her sonnets’ speaker adopts make her poetry an important test case for
our understanding of privacy and literature.
Through an examination of Lock’s 1560 sonnet sequence “A Meditation
of a Penitent Sinner: Written in Maner of a Paraphrase upon the 51. Psalme
of David,” and the ideas of Calvin and Knox on which she draws, I seek
to revise the assumption that solitary prayer depicted privacy in the
limited sense of “isolation.” Lock’s representation of devotional privacy
shows how Reformation thinkers both distinguished isolated from inti-
mate privacy and used the performance of privacy to create sympathetic
identifications among a dispersed Protestant community.2 Lock’s poem,
the first sonnet sequence written in English and a Calvinist statement
of a sinner’s encounter with God, appeared at a turning point both in
the history of literary form and in English Protestantism. My reading
of “A Meditation” reveals a multilayered vision of privacy. Lock depicts
the condition of the unregenerate sinner as one of true isolation, while
she imagines union with God as a different kind of privacy – the pri-
vacy of intimate, extra-domestic friendship. The process of regeneration
20
Private Lament in Calvin, Knox, and Anne Lock 21
involves a movement from the isolated privacy of despair to intimate

privacy with God, and further outward yet, to communicate one’s own
experience of privacy to the “invisible” church of fugitive or persecuted
Protestants, creating a public of sympathetic identification. Thus, for
Lock, as for Calvin and Knox, the performance of intimate privacy is
essential to creating a godly public.
The Book of Psalms provides telling examples of the kind of privacy
that Protestants sought while reading the Bible: a privacy modeled not on
solitary contemplation, but on the familiar social relation of hierarchical
intimacy with a superior. From the earliest days of the Reformation, the
Book of Psalms shaped the Protestant understanding of sin, prayer, and
regeneration.3 The ubiquitous sixteenth-century Sternhold and Hopkins
metrical psalter often included as preface an excerpt from Athanasius
(c. 296–373 CE), explaining “how, where and in what manner ye may
use the Psalmes”:
For as he whiche goeth to a kyng, composeth fyrst his behaviour,

and setteth in order his words, least he shoulde be counted rusticall
and rude: so this devine booke, fyrst by choise of all motions, wher-
with the soule is affected, warneth, then frameth and instructreth
by divers formes of speaking all suche as covet vertue, and desyre to
knowe the lyfe of the Saviour. It is easy therefore for every man to
finde out in the Psalmes, the motion and state of his owne soule, and
by that meanes, his own figure and proper erudition. Moreover with
what words he may please God, & with what wordes he may correcte
himself, and geve God thankes, Lest if he speake that thing whiche
is not leeful, he fall into impietie. For not alone of dedes but also of
everye worde muste we geve accounte before the judge.4
Like a conduct guide or letter-writing manual, the excerpt then lists

dozens of situations and psalms appropriate to those. The sixteenth-
century proliferation of poetry and devotional prose based on the
psalms can thus be seen as a response to the logic of typology: the
psalmist, the modern psalm imitator, and their readers were bound
together as types of God’s elect.5 Psalm readers were taught to see
themselves as privileged eavesdroppers on an intimate conversation that
modeled the laying bare of a sinner’s soul in familiar communion
with God. The reader then would imitate the psalmist’s style in his or
her own approach to God; translators or paraphrasers of the Psalms
only differed from mere readers in that they committed to writing
the imitative prayer that all Bible readers were expected to perform.
Each poet/reader shared an exclusive privacy in relation to God, but also

made that private moment public by offering his or her own laments for
others to imitate in prayer.
Anne Lock’s contribution to the Reformation surge of writing on
the psalms explores the theme of private communion with God with
unusual intensity. “A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner” devotes approxi-
mately one sonnet to each verse of Psalm 51, known as the Miserere mei
Deus. Critics have noted both the poem’s fidelity to Calvinist theology
and its pervasive use of repetition. However, a simple recitation of
doctrine fails to capture the poem’s complex stylistics and treatment
of privacy and publicity. Her dedicatory epistle, her prefatory sonnets,
records of her correspondence, and echoes between her poem and her
translations of Calvin’s sermons all reveal Lock reflecting on the role of
privacy in the genre of godly complaint or lament. Although Protestants
agreed that Psalm 51 depicts King David lamenting his adultery with
Bathsheba and the murder of her husband Uriah, the Protestant imita-
tor of David faced a host of interpretive difficulties, including whether
to take an accusatory or humble stance towards God and whether to
depict resolutely suppressed despair or ecstatic emotional abandon-
ment.6 Lock traces a path for the penitent from solitary privacy marked
by shame and confusion, to the comfort of intimate privacy with God,
to the publication of that intimacy as a model for the communion of
saints or “invisible” church.7 Moreover, she transforms the shamed
“public woman,” Bathsheba, into a fellow penitent and exemplary
model for the elect by making room for Bathsheba’s perspective as well
as David’s in the background narrative to the psalm. Lock’s twin themes
of intimacy and publicity allow readers to identify with either David or
Bathsheba as they express the humiliation of sin and a triumphant faith
in God’s forgiveness.
Throughout her long career of Protestant activism, Anne Lock risked
persecution and worse by taking public stands for the “new religion.”
Born and raised in the London merchant class, she traveled in circles
into which Protestantism made early, deep inroads. Her father, Stephen
Vaughan, a merchant and crown agent in Flanders and Holland, was
accused of Protestant heresy more than once in the 1530s. While he
denied being “Lutheran or Tyndalian,” he declared, “nor do I put my
trust in the learning of any earthly creature. I have the holy scriptures,
given to me by Christ’s church,” an assertion of the principle of sola
scriptura that just skirts being an outright assertion of Protestantism.8
Sent in 1530 to bring Protestant exile and Bible translator William
Tyndale back to England, Vaughan instead became an advocate for
Tyndale and tried unsuccessfully to save him from execution in 1536.

Lock’s mother may also have encountered Protestant activists through
her contact with Anne Boleyn’s court, where she served as a silkwoman;
when she died, Vaughan married Margery Brinklow, the widow of a
writer of Protestant polemics. In 1551, Anne Vaughan further buttressed
her family’s Protestant alliances by marrying Henry Lock, an associate of
her father’s whose family reputedly read banned Protestant works. The
Lock family prominently supported the “new religion,” for both the
new couple and Henry Lock’s sister Rose Hickman hosted John Knox
during his visits to London.9 Afterwards, Knox corresponded with both
Lock and her sister-in-law, asking them to communicate news and
advice to his London supporters and to channel funds for the cause.
When Queen Mary reinstated the Mass, Lock heeded Knox’s warnings
to avoid “alsweill the occasioun of idolatrie as the plaguis that assuiredlie
sall follow that abominatioun” by joining the English exile community
in Geneva, albeit at great cost: her infant daughter died days after her
arrival.10
Back in England under Queen Elizabeth, Lock continued to build
Protestant alliances and began to publish her writing. In 1560 her
translation of Calvin’s sermons appeared with the sonnet sequence
“A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner,” designated in a prefatory note “not
as parcell of maister Calvines worke, but for that it well agreeth with
the same argument, and was delivered me by my frend with whom
I knew I might be so bold to use and publishe as it pleased me.”11
On her husband’s death in 1571, she married a prominent Calvinist
preacher, Edward Dering, whose preaching license was revoked for non-
conformity. Lock joined in the public risks taken by her husband, for
his letters demonstrate anxiety that his wife, too, might be questioned
by the authorities, and she contributed a Latin verse to a presentation
manuscript probably intended to rehabilitate Dering.12 After Dering’s
death in 1575 and her marriage to Richard Prowse of Exeter, Lock con-
tinued to move in activist circles; in 1585 John Field published a sermon
by Knox that he had obtained from her, dedicating it to her as “my very
godly friend.”13 Lock’s last known publication is her 1590 translation of
Jean Taffin’s On the Marks of the Children of God (Des Marques des enfans
de Dieu, 1586).14
Critics have noted the careful thematic integration among the three
parts of Lock’s 1560 book: her dedication to Katherine Bertie, Duchess of
Suffolk; the content of Calvin’s sermons on Isaiah 38; and her concluding
sonnet sequence paraphrasing Psalm 51. I want to make a stronger claim:
that the work’s three parts constitute a sustained meditation on the topic
of complaining or lamenting to God.15 Of the 342 sermons on Isaiah

that Calvin preached in Geneva from 1556 to 1559, which circulated
in a manuscript transcription, Lock chose four sermons addressing the
lament of King Hezekiah.16 When she (or perhaps the printer) notes that
her poem “agreeth with the same argument” as the rest of the book, the
most likely meaning is that every aspect of the book reflects sinners’
need to lament to God (62). The dedication to the Duchess of Suffolk,
a fellow Marian exile, presents the volume as a prescription for the dis-
ease of spiritual despair, one written by “God the heavenly Physitian,”
compounded by “his most excellent Apothecarie master John Calvine,”
and placed by Lock herself into an “Englishe box” (5).17 The remedy is
homeopathic: the believing Christian, “beyng stong with the stinge of
the scorpion … knoweth howe with oyle of the same scorpion to be
healed agayne”; when stung with remembrance of sin, one must turn
to God to openly acknowledge the depth of one’s transgressions and
repent (7). Calvin’s sermons, Lock assures the duchess, demonstrate the
posture in which one must turn to God, for they depict King Hezekiah
in the state of invalidism characteristic of the lamenting psalmist:
“somtime chillinge and chattering with colde, somtime languishing and
meltyng away with heate, nowe fresing, now fryeng, nowe spechelesse,
nowe crying out” (7). Calvin’s sermons explore the theological purposes
of this spiritual and physical chaos, while Lock’s sonnet sequence draws
a parallel between Hezekiah and David, two kings physically and mentally
debilitated by the force of spiritual disease.
Calvin and Knox on Individual Laments: Triumph

and Shame
The Book of Psalms comprises many forms, including individual and

communal utterances and genres such as wisdom, praise, lament, thanks-
giving, and the cursing of enemies. Early modern Protestants were most
interested in psalms of lament, particularly those known as the “penitential
psalms,” in which an individual speaker confesses his transgressions and
begs God for forgiveness. Reformation thinkers saw the act of lament
in the Psalms as both a test of the soul crucial to its salvation and the
source of inner conflicts between passion and self-control, shame and
triumph, and remembrance and forgetting of sin.18 For Protestants, the
lament form properly acknowledged the negligible worth of human
beings when measured against God, and therefore powerfully conveyed
the drama of the reprobate sinner encountering God. Therefore,
Protestants elevated laments to the paradigmatic manner of prayer and
the form of utterance necessary at the threshold to justification and

sanctification. The crisis of conscience that must precede the acknowledg-
ment of human depravity and of God’s unwarranted grace would
naturally express itself in the form of lament. John Knox can be seen
putting this theology into pastoral practice in letters from Geneva and
Scotland to his coreligionists in England. His correspondents seem con-
tinually on the point of utter despair, a condition that, Knox assures
them, is actually salutary. Knox promises Thomas Upcher that his
torment has a purpose: consider, he notes, the many elect who have
left “lamentabill voces” “in testimony of their battell, yea, of thair
anguische and paine,” including David, Job, and Paul. The despair that
arises from knowledge of human depravity causes the elect to approach
God in the right spirit of lamentation: “yf to Chryst ... can none sted
fastlie cleif except sic as be dispairit of thair awn strenth, of necessitie
it is that by ernist contemplatioun of oure selves we are brocht to the
verie knawledge of oure awn corruptioun, and sa in the end provokit to
embrace the remedie whilk is frelie offirit.”19
The more abjectly David complains, the more comfort the saints
should take in their times of despair, as Knox advised Lock:
The exemples of God’s childrein alwayes complaining of their owne

wretchednes, serve for the penitent, that they slide not in despera-
tioun. Better is the sense and feilling of sinne so stinking in our owne
nosetharles, that to Christ Jesus we may runne, and have our feete
washed, than the opinioun of vertue that puffeth up our pride, and
maketh man careless to complaine before his God.20
Nevertheless, addressing oneself to God was an act fraught with terrors,

for, Protestant thinkers stressed, the reprobate soul deserves nothing yet
must ask for all. The Book of Psalms demonstrated the way to enter into
the freedom of intimacy with God, allowing a petitioner to reveal his
or her own soul and demand of God the undeserved favor of justifica-
tion. David could be seen as God’s favorite, the preferred courtier whose
exemplary conduct would guide anyone wishing to rise in God’s sight.21
For Lock, Calvin, and Knox, the private space of lament not only
allows the free confession of sin and pleading for mercy, but evokes a
comforting intimacy with God. The language in which Calvin and Knox
describe the speaker’s relation to God draws on the early modern social
form of intimate, yet hierarchical ties between social superiors and infe-
riors such as kings and courtiers, patrons and clients, lords and vassals,
and masters and servants. “Familiarity” is a key word in this context,
suggesting constraints lifted, favors conferred, and emotional closeness

with one’s protector and superior. John Knox describes David’s “sobis
and gronis” in his laments as expressing
the desyre he had to be restorit to that confort and consolatioun

whilk sumtymes he had felt, by the familiaritie whilk he had with
God. ... But it is cheiflie to be notit, that David in this his anguische
remembreth that God sumtymes had bene familiar with him, for he
sayeth, “Turne agane, O Lord,” signifeing heirby, that befoir he had
felt the [sweetness] of Godis presence; but now he was left to him
self, without feilling of confort or consolatioun.22
Knox’s editor, David Laing, attempts to clarify Knox’s phrase “familiar

with him” for the modern reader by glossing it as “present.” However,
Knox’s repeated use of “confort and consolatioun” and his reference to
the “[sweetness] of Godis presence” point to a richer set of allusions.
Knox doesn’t mean only that God is present, but that he admits the
lamenting speaker into a special relation of intimacy. We will see that
Calvin speaks of the “privilege” of “familiar access” to God, terms sug-
gesting favors conferred on a social inferior.
Although Calvin and Knox alike represent the lament as an opportu-
nity for privileged freedom in private communion with God, important
differences mark their descriptions of the correct posture and attitude
of the lamenter; that is, in the words of the Sternhold and Hopkins
psalter, “with whate forme of words he may amende himselfe.” Should
the speaker’s diction be polished and artful, as befits divinely inspired
poetry, or chaotic and stuttering, suiting the helplessness of fallen
human nature? Would the speaker imitate David’s authoritative persona
as prophet and priest conveying God’s will to humankind, or David’s
fallible role as Everysinner? How could the poet-paraphraser represent
the psalmist as one of the elect while also conveying the speaker’s fallen
nature, his despairing helplessness before God, and his crippling fear
of reprobation? John Knox describes the sinner approaching God as a
pugilist spoiling for a fight, demanding that God fulfill his promise of
grace. The more deeply the sinner recognizes his or her reprobate status,
the more assertively he or she will call on God as the only possible aid to
averting damnation. In contrast, for Calvin, shame marks the lamenter’s
consciousness as he or she both strives for self-mastery and humbly
acknowledges psychic disarray.
Both Knox and Calvin’s psalm commentaries take note of the com-
mon psalm trope in which the speaker complains of undeserved suffering
inflicted on him by his enemies. The psalmist cites his faithful service
to God as warrant for just release from the distress that God has allowed
to continue. Isolated by suffering, the solitary speaker or a group of
outcasts confronts God with the accusatory questions “Why?” and
“How long?” For example, Psalm 44 expresses a collective complaint
against an apparently ungrateful God who has failed to repay the faith-
fulness of his people: “Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord? /
Awake! Do not cast us off forever! / Why do you hide your face? / Why
do you forget our affliction and oppression?” (Ps 44: 23–4, NRSV). In
Psalm 13, an individual lament, repeated questioning suggests the
speaker’s despair:
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I bear pain in my soul,
and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? (Ps 13: 1–2, NRSV)23
The accusatory questions of psalm laments can only be understood

within the context of intimate personal address, for they seek to pro-
voke God rather than condemn him.
Knox greets the psalms’ accusatory questions as salutary evidence of
the speakers’ courage in addressing God despite the despair that “the
flesche, naturall reasone, the law of God, the present torment, and the
Devill” instill by convincing them that “God is angrie, and thairfoir is
thair nether help nor remedie to be hoipit for at his handis” (137). For
Knox, the privacy of lament allows the speaker to freely express the
doubts that plague him. In personal letters, he encourages friends to
voice their doubts; the fact of their utterance, he argues, reveals that the
speaker still retains some sense of trust in God. To lament to God when
assailed by doubt, Knox asserts, is a sign of election: “At suche tyme,
I say, to sob unto God is the demonstratioun of the secreit seid of God,
whilk is hid in Godis elect childrene.”24 It is easy, Knox remarks, to call
on God when we are upheld by his strength; but when we experience
our own weakness, God appears much like an enemy. At these times, to
call on God, “whome we think armit to our distructioun,” and to open
to him our “grevous complaynt” is an act of courage:
… when [God] apeiris to leif us a litill in our awne weak corruptioun,

and to schaw his face angrie aganis sin, then to seik unto his promis-
sis, then to call upon his help, and to appeill to him as it wer that
he declair himself a trew, mercifull, and benyng Father towardis us,

is the greattest glorie that we can gif unto him; yea, it is to overcum
him, and to be victour over him be his awn strenth.25
Like a child who demonstrates precociousness by audacious questioning,

the sinner proves by insistent, even aggressive demands an advanced
understanding of God’s promises. For Knox, to accuse God is a most
natural reaction to the human condition. He advises his coreligionists
to “despaire you not, albeit the flesh somtyme bursteth out in hevy
complaynts, as it were against God. You are not more perfect then was
David and Job, and you cannot be so perfecte as Christ himselfe was,
who upon the cross cried, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?’”26 The lament allows a Christian to throw his or her needs at God’s
feet, to recognize his or her own corruption, and to protest violently
to the only quarter from which relief from sin can emerge. Knox prom-
ises those in despair that private communion with God will liberate rather
than constrain, and his preferred metaphor for such communion, as
we have seen above, is a “battell” (Knox to Upcher, 242). Even though
“God him selff appeireth to be our enemy,” lamenting sinners should
cast off the logic of just punishment and, in Knox’s words, dare “to say,
or to think, with Job in his trubill, ‘Albeit he suld destroy or sla me, yit
will I trust in him.’”27 Although he describes the lamenter’s sin as “stink-
ing in his nosetharles,” Knox does not hint that the sinner’s despair
ought to be tinged by shame; in fact, he encourages his interlocutors to
demand God’s grace as a birthright.
However, in Calvin’s writings shame emerges as a key element in
lament: it conveys the lamenter’s acknowledgment of his spiritual
poverty and reflects his desire to hide or restrain the worst elements
of his nature.28 Like Knox, Calvin delights in the paradox that only in
the most elevated of presences can the psalmist reveal his unworthi-
ness. The lamenter must overcome shame to confess his sins; for him,
the psalms are a triumph of self-exposure made possible through the
privacy of prayer. The psalms’ atmosphere of private, truthful com-
munication encourages the reader to bring his or her sins to God’s
notice:
… this book [of the Psalms] makes known to us this privilege, which
is desirable above all others – that not only is there opened up to us
familiar access to God, but also that we have permission and freedom
granted us to lay open before him our infirmities, which we would
be ashamed to confess before men.29
Were the lamenter to submit entirely to fear of God he would remain

cowering in secret; instead, he must gather his forces enough to reveal
his shame to God, and then to the world: “Ezechias sheweth that it is
not ynough that he prayseth God in secrete, but that he wyll styrre
up other” (Lock, 58). Overcoming the boundary between private and
public lament is the ultimate goal of the individual spiritual crisis. As
a result, while shame cripples the lamenter, his godly triumph lies in
presenting that shame publicly.
Although for Calvin the private space of lament offers one the free-
dom to unveil one’s own iniquities, he stresses that freedom should
be tempered with restraint. Patience is a key virtue in Calvin’s teaching
on how to receive the grace of God; he emphasizes that the godly
life is one of suffering and encourages Christians to bear the cross
patiently. For this reason, Calvin’s attitude towards the psalms’
displays of passion is mixed: evidence of inner conflict shows that a
battle with evil is taking place, but the proper reaction to one’s exces-
sive emotions is shame and heroic efforts at self-control. Rather than
“overcome” God with his pleas, as Knox envisioned, Calvin’s sinner
should struggle with himself.30 For both Calvin and Knox, human
beings are susceptible to a natural despair that is a necessary step for
crippled souls on the route to justification, but Calvin insists that we
should despise this despair as another sign of our constituent weak-
ness: “let us know that all our sorowes, complaintes and groninges,
oughte to be suspicious unto us, bycause we can not kepe measure
by reason of the frailtie that is in us” (Lock, 58). On the other hand,
Calvin denigrates the Stoic school, for the “Christian, unlike the
Stoic, gives expression to his pain and sorrow.”31 The fine distinctions
necessary between godly and ungodly lament are evident in Calvin’s
discussion of the aggrieved tone of lament psalms like Psalm 38. Here,
Calvin notes that although “in bewailing his own miseries, [David]
may seem in some measure to quarrel with God, yet he still cherishes
the humble conviction ... that there is no rest for him but in implor-
ing the Divine compassion and forgiveness”; only the ungodly truly
“murmur against God, like the wild beasts which, in their rage, gnaw
the chains with which they are bound.”32 He strives to distinguish
between anguished lament, which acknowledges one’s sins, and accu-
satory lament, which sins against God. While the psalmist should
complain of his frailty, he must be aware that the urge to complain
is itself an indication of corruption, and must anxiously monitor
the complaint in order to restrain his all too human instinct to turn
against God.
Lock’s Laments: Shame and Exposure
As Knox and Calvin struggled with the problem of the sinner’s address to
God, so did Anne Lock. Although of Lock’s works only her publications
and one manuscript poem survive, the letters written to her in 1556–62
by John Knox preserve a fragmentary record of her inner life in his
responses to her letters. Knox’s answers show that Lock’s thoughts dwelt
on the nature of penitential lament.33 Many of his letters convey news
of his political and religious campaigns in Geneva and Scotland, requests
for financial support, and advice on how the godly should live under
the constraints of first Queen Mary’s Catholic regime and then Queen
Elizabeth’s via media. However, several address Lock’s spiritual crises,
attempting to assuage her despair of election. Knox’s brief but telling
references to Lock’s letters indicate that in September 1559, six months
or less before her translations and poem were published, her imitation
of David spilled beyond the boundaries of the poem and encompassed
her spiritual life as a whole.34 He alludes to the “complaint and prayer of
your letter writtin, say yee, at midnight.” Like the lamenting psalmists,
Lock identifies the lonely night as the setting for her moment of truth.
Her complaint imitates the penitential psalms by focusing on her sins
and pleading for, while almost despairing of, God’s mercy. Knox assures
her that her fears of reprobation should be ameliorated by her complaint
itself, for the Holy Spirit “floweth and giveth witnes of itself in your
grevous complaynt and ernist prayer.”35 Like David, Lock demonstrates
her godliness by throwing her self-doubt at God’s feet. Nevertheless, she
addressed this complaint to Knox rather than to God. Having translated
Calvin’s sermons on Hezekiah’s lament, written her own penitential
psalm paraphrase, imbibed Knox’s views of lament through his letters
and other writings, and probably read Calvin’s commentaries on the
psalms, Lock must have been well aware of Knox’s often-expressed pre-
cepts, and must have known that her midnight complaint mirrored that
of David. Presumably, she wanted an eavesdropper on her communion
with God; she wanted Knox to read her lament and judge her worthy,
just as she had read the evidence of election in David’s despairing psalms.
Lock’s “Meditation of a Penitent Sinner” is therefore consistent with her
epistolary imitation of David; here, in a rehearsal for the publication
of her poem, she invites the world rather than Knox alone to overhear
her voicing of David’s penitence. As we will see, she considered public
exposure a key factor in the salutary effects of lament.
Lock’s solution to the problem of the lamenter’s attitude suggests
an intriguing model of authorship in which a godly writer reveals his
or her sinful nature to the world with mixed shame and triumph. Her
strategy suits both Knox’s praise for the freedom of throwing oneself at
God’s feet and Calvin’s insistence on the lamenter’s shame and struggle
for self-control. This dialectic between affective chaos and self-mastery,
shame and public self-revelation, emerges in her poem through the
theme of exposure. In the prefatory sonnets, Lock’s speaker feels God’s
wrath bodily: images of physical suffering, pain, and debility convey the
overwhelming effect of a despair so shattering as to split the self into
antagonistic factions. Although certain of deserving Hell, the speaker
does not suffer anxiety about the tortures in store so much as lament
his or her distance from God, the “everlastyng hate, / That I conceive
the heavens king to beare / Against my sinfull and forsaken ghost”
(60–62).
Lock borrows freely from the Book of Psalms at large to frame her
expansion of Psalm 51. She locates the sinner at the tormenting dis-
tance from God described by the psalmists as “the Pit” in the NRSV
(Ps. 16:10, 28:1, 30:9): for Lock, “the ugglye place” that is “in darke
of everlasting night” (34–5). The lament psalms reinforce the theme
of the speaker’s privacy by setting individual laments in an isolated
context: the psalmist’s plea often emerges at night or from his bed,
or else a pit or even a grave signifies utter alienation. The psalmist
declares in Psalm 130: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.” Or,
more explicitly: “I am counted among those who go down to the Pit; /
I am like those who have no help, / like those forsaken among the
dead, / like the slain that lie in the grave …” (Ps. 130:1; 88:4–5, NRSV).
Darkness, loneliness, vague but omnipresent threats, and a despairing
wish for both community and assistance characterize the laments.
Despite the psalmist’s wish to share these burdens, individual laments
evince skepticism about the possibility of authentic expression in
public sight. The enemies who torment the psalmist are respected by
the community, but curse God in their hearts. “Their ways prosper at
all times,” reports Psalm 10 of the “evildoers”; “Their eyes stealthily
watch for the helpless, / they lurk in secret like a lion in its covert; /
they lurk that they may seize the poor …” (Ps. 10:5, 8–10, NRSV). All
are fooled by the enemy but the speaker, who whispers the truth to
God in the night. The psalmist is one of the helpless, one spurned
even by his friends, and in the world of the lament there is no pos-
sible recourse to human aid; the wicked triumph and the godly are
crushed, while only God, penetrating to the secret truth in each
one’s soul, perceives these injustices.36 Only in privacy can truth be
tested and trust established: Psalm 17 promises God that “If you try
my heart, if you visit me by night / if you test me, you will find no
wickedness in me; / my mouth does not transgress” (Ps. 17:3, NRSV).
In paranoid moments like these, all public statements vent only
hypocrisy; the social space where private lament is uttered offers the
sole form of authentic expression. Lock’s use of the theme of privacy
provides context for the speaker’s despair and dramatizes the speaker’s
turn to optimism in the psalm’s final vision of New Jerusalem. In her
interpretation, God’s benevolent acceptance of the speaker’s lament
transforms the meaning of privacy from isolation to the intimacy
envisioned by Calvin and Knox.
In the prefatory sonnets, a primary trope of debility through which
Lock conveys this sense of isolation is that of blindness and sight.37
In sonnet one, a gruesome, yet dazzling vision of “the lothesome filth
of my disteined life” blocks her sight like a cataract.38 As a result, her
“dimmed and fordullen eyen / Full fraught with teares” have become
blind and “can not enjoy the comfort of the light.” In sonnet two we
understand this light as God’s grace, a “cheerful glimpse” of which has
guided others “out of the ugglye place,” where the speaker remains
“in darke of everlasting night.” The subtext of Lock’s plays on light
and sight is a view of grace as a clearing of the vision: the speaker’s
consciousness of sin dominates her view, blocking a true perception
of God as a merciful father rather than a vengeful judge. Lock further
develops the blinding effects of sin in sonnet three, where the cataract
image transforms into a scene of exposure. The speaker’s personified
despair now “before my ruthful eye / Spredes forth my sinne and
shame,” telling the speaker that pleas for God’s mercy are in vain. The
sinner’s identity is split between the accusatory voice of despair and
the “refused wight,” powerless to answer its charges. Lock then splits
the speaker’s persona further as the speaker’s “beknowyng hart” and
conscience chime in: “As selfe witnes of thy beknowyng hart, / And
secret gilt of thine owne conscience saith” (51–2). The knowledge of
one’s sin is a private guilt, a secret kept from oneself until the combined
forces of conscience and despair expose it. The sight trope continues
in the final prefatory sonnet, but shifts from the theme of blindness to
the gaze in order to highlight shame rather than guilt: the speaker is
now exposed before God. Rather than remaining blind, the speaker
now refuses to look at God, “not daring with presuming eye / Once to
beholde the angry heavens face” (70–71). Despite the shame that bends
his or her gaze, the speaker kneels and prays for mercy. The prefatory
sonnets thus establish several levels of privacy and exposure through
sight metaphors: the speaker is first isolated by blindness, then exposed
by the accusations of Despair and Conscience, and finally approaches

God with a gaze averted in shame.
Exposure and shame in the prefatory sonnets are followed by a scene
of scathing revelation in the body of the sonnet sequence, the poems
paraphrasing Psalm 51. The speaker’s isolation now gives way to
direct address to God, and again Conscience exposes the sinner, this
time before God. Lock amplifies the psalm’s verse four, which she
translates as “Againste thee onelye have I sinned, and don evill in thy
sight” (51:4, Lock) with a vision of the sinner’s punishing conscience
in sonnet five:39
Graunt thou me mercy, Lord: thee thee alone

I have offended, and offendyng thee,
For mercy loe, how I do lye and grone.
Thou with allpearcing eye beheldest me,
Without regard that sinned in thy sight.
Beholde againe, how now my sprite it rues,
And wailes the tyme, when I with foule delight
Thy swete forbearing mercy did abuse.
My cruell conscience with sharpned knife
Doth splat my ripped hert, and layes abrode
The lothesome secretes of my filthy life,
And spredes them forth before the face of God,
Whom shame from dede shamelesse cold not restrain,
Shame for my dede is added to my paine. (143–56)
In this “ripped hert,” Lock depicts a vivisection scene, a dramatically

violent image that configures shame as torture, as Edmund Spenser
would later do when presenting the tortures of Amoret in the House
of Busirane (Faerie Queene III.xii.30–32). Lock subtly frames the victim’s
flaying and exposure with references to the feminine space of the
kitchen, much as she alludes to the feminine sphere of herbal medicines
in her dedicatory letter.40 Her wonderful verb “splat” (line 152) is a
cooking term proper to the dressing of a pike, meaning “to cut up, or
split open” or “to lay out flat” (OED def. 1, 2). In this portrait of abjec-
tion, the sinner is gutted like a fish by the cruel cook Conscience, who
exposes sins to the air like gory entrails. However, a few sonnets later
Lock offers a re-evaluation of this exposure. She seizes on verse six,
“But lo, thou haste loved trueth, the hidden and secrete thinges of thy
wisdome thou haste opened unto me” (51:6, Lock). We have seen that
Knox links the performance of lament to recognizing the “secreit seid
of God” within that promises one’s election.41 Now, in sonnet eight, the
knowledge of sin constitutes “secret wisdom,” not a source of shame but
a divine gift:
This secrete wisedom hast thou graunted me,

To se my sinnes, and whence my sinnes do growe:
This hidden knowledge have I learnd of thee,
To fele my sinnes, and howe my sinnes do flowe … (185–8)
The speaker flees this flood of sins, but is “Releved simply by thy hand”
(196). The connotations of secrecy metamorphose from shame and
consequent exposure in sonnet five to the gift of insight, painful but
empowering, in sonnet eight.42
The speaker’s wavering between privacy and publicity evokes the par-
adox of imputed grace: the speaker’s faults are both seen and not seen,
exposed while also hidden. Lock develops the theme of shame further
in sonnet eleven, which corresponds to the verse “Turne away thy face
from my sinnes, and do away all my misdedes” (51:11, Lock). Rejecting
the verse’s explicit meaning, Lock begins with its opposite:
Loke on me, Lord: though trembling I beknowe,

That sight of sinne so sore offendeth thee,
That seing sinne, how it doth overflowe
My whelmed soule, thou canst not loke on me,
But with disdaine, with horror and despite.
Loke on me, Lord: but loke not on my sinne.
Not that I hope to hyde it from thy sight,
Which seest me all without and eke within.
But so remove it from thy wrathfull eye,
And from the justice of thyne angry face,
That thou impute it not. Looke not how I
Am foule by sinne: but make me by thy grace
Pure in thy mercies sight, and, Lord, I pray,
That hatest sinne, wipe all my sinnes away. (227–40)
Lock’s surprising decision to paraphrase “Turne away thy face” with

“Loke on me, Lord,” suggests the importance of God’s intimate gaze,
which even deep shame cannot prompt the speaker to wish deflected.
Since God can only look on with horror, the speaker both desires
to be seen and cringes with shame, asking God to turn away while
acknowledging that His eye “seest me all without and eke within” (233).
The speaker’s pendulum swings between shame and self-exposure convey

the drama of imputed grace: sin is hidden from God’s “wrathful eye”
while purified in his “mercies sight” (235, 239).
Lock’s Plain Style: Abandonment and Control
The recurrence of a scene of exposure is one of many echoes in Lock’s

cyclical poem: repeated images, phrases, words, and themes unite
individual sonnets and the entire sequence. Lock’s repetition gives
her sonnets a studiously plain style, appropriate to Calvin’s advice
that lamenting sinners should struggle for self-control. In the sermons
Lock chose, Calvin specifically addresses how the lamenter’s battle for
self-control should express itself in words. The lamenter’s inability to
express himself properly is a sign of his election and of the struggle with
Satan involved in sanctification; therefore, Calvin condemns overly
ordered and rhetorically virtuosic laments. The effortless mastery of
language and meaning that characterizes successful worldly poetry fails
to convey the intensity of a sinner’s communion with God, his terrors
of conscience, and the chasm between fallen human understanding
and divine justice and mercy. However, an affect marked by utter disar-
ray and a godly invocation lacking in form might suggest the absence
of Christian patience. According to Calvin, Ezechias must “nedes be as
a water that is powred out and spilt. See nowe what is the cause that
he could frame no manner of complaint to expresse his griefe, and yet
could he never kepe silence” (Lock, 27). Similarly, the penitent David
determines to remain dumb, but even silence is beyond his power:
even then was he deceaved, and shewed all that was hyden in his
harte, although it were not by wordes well ordred and placed. And to
be short, they that knowe in deede what the wrathe of God is, wyll
speake and crye, and yet they know not on whiche side to begin: and
again when they holde their peace they wote not why they doe it:
but they ar alway in anguish. (Lock, 28)
To feel oneself unable to bring forth words is only appropriate, for the
true penitent is torn between tongue-tied silence and the eruption
of disordered emotions. In the same discussion, Calvin implies that
addressing God in set terms and ornamented speech would demonstrate
insincerity. Instead, he writes, “let us chatter, that is to say, let us cast
forth grones and sighes which may shew some excessive passion ... if
one would make an arte of Rethorick of the praiers of the faithful, it is
a great abuse” (Lock, 29). The demands, then, on an imitator of David

are weighty and contradictory: displays of ecstatic emotion unchained
by rhetorical mastery are as necessary as demonstrations of humble
self-control.43 For Calvin, to lament is to school oneself in a mixture of
abandon and self-control. The demands that Calvin places on the
rhetoric of lament depict the lamenter’s private communion with God
as an inward struggle for self-mastery rather than the free intimacy that
Knox imagines.
Lock’s use of domestic imagery and simple diction also contributed to
a plain style that suits Calvin’s warnings against either succumbing to
one’s “sighs and grones” or creating an “arte of Rhetorick of the prayers
of the faithful” (29). She addresses the need for plain speech when she
explicates the verse “But lo, thou haste loved trueth” (Ps. 51:6, Lock)
in sonnet eight. As we have seen, this sonnet thematizes the “secret
wisdom” mentioned in the psalm, but Lock takes a surprising turn in
exploring the theme of truth. The first quatrain emphasizes not truth
itself, but the related concept of simplicity:
Thou lovest simple sooth, not hidden face

With trutheles visour of deceiving showe.
Lo simplie, Lord, I do confesse my case,
And simplie crave thy mercy in my woe.
This secrete wisedom hast thou graunted me,
To se my sinnes, and whence my sinnes do growe:
This hidden knowledge have I learnd of thee,
To fele my sinnes, and howe my sinnes do flowe
With such excesse, that with unfained hert,
Dreding to drowne, my Lorde, lo howe I flee,
Simply with teares bewailyng my desert,
Releved simply by thy hand to be.
Thou lovest truth, thou taughtest me the same.
Helpe, Lord of truth, for glory of thy name. (185–98)
While the Bible verse highlights the divine secrets to which the believer
is privy, Lock’s first quatrain is concerned with the private relationship
between the believer and God; facing God, the believer can be her
(or his) authentic self, rejecting a “hidden face” or “trutheles visour.” The
sonnet’s subtext concerns the way in which the lamenter expresses
authenticity through words. The key word “simply” denotes both plain-
ness and truth, and Lock emphasizes this dual meaning with the first
line’s phrase “simple sooth,” that is, “plain truth.” The sonnet performs
the simplicity demanded by the speaker’s figuratively naked encounter

with God. Lock’s use of ordinary diction indicates a refusal of artistry;
here is the humble abjurer of rhetoric that Calvin imagined, one who
voices a “confused crye” (73).
At the same time, Lock’s speaker attempts to assert self-control, or,
as Calvin put it, to “kepe measure,” in the midst of chaotic feeling
through highly patterned, formal techniques: anadiplosis, alliteration,
and the intricate rhyme and meter of the sonnet form. Lock underlines
the psalmist’s urgent struggle for self-control through repetition in lines
like these:
Yet blinde, alas, I groape about for grace.

While blinde for grace I groape about in vaine,
My fainting breath I gather up and straine,
Mercie, mercie to crye and crye againe. (38–41)
Lock’s proclivity for alliteration may merely reflect the style of the times,
for contemporary anthologies such as Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) and The
Mirror for Magistrates (1559) bristled with it. However, her repetition
of words and phrases is absent in her later poem “The Necessitie and
Benefite of Affliction”; furthermore, her use of anadiplosis has a clear pur-
pose in characterizing her speaker’s state of mind.44 Her speaker’s verbal
groping reflects both penitence and the difficulty of progressing towards
regeneration, for the speaker cannot even state his or her condition
without aid: “My speache doth faile to utter thee my smart” (314).
The emotional subtlety of Lock’s sequence is lost when her formal
and repetitive techniques are attributed to mere doctrinal fealty. Roland
Greene addresses Lock’s repetition at length, noting that her paraphrase
expands the psalm radically by devoting approximately one sonnet
to each verse, yet remains largely within the language of the original.
Generally, Greene observes, the poems “attempt to refuse invention,
sometimes explicitly, and circle determinedly over small matter, turn-
ing over the same questions in stock fashion.”45 He attributes Lock’s
circular style to the twin forces of hermeneutic caution and the gen-
dering of invention, maintaining that she refuses the secular male
aggrandizement of imaginative invention and contains her work within
the style coded feminine that Patricia Parker has termed “dilation.”46
Greene argues that “the sonnets consist of fourteen lines without emo-
tional modulation or intellectual conclusions,” thus creating “a single
unmodulated outlook, … gesturing implicitly toward a single turn to
God.”47 Lock’s use of repetition has greater significance than a refusal
of invention: she conveys the speaker’s turbulent emotional state while

demonstrating the compulsion to repeat that is endemic to sin.48 The
poem’s structure conveys both repetition and change: first the prefa-
tory sonnets explore the psyche of the despairing sinner, then the
paraphrase of Psalm 51 depicts a reawakening consciousness of sin, now
with a difference. The psalmist takes courage and calls on God’s mercy,
suggesting, in accordance with Calvin, that each recurrence of despair
and anxiety brings the sinner closer to reconciliation with God.
Like the theme of exposure, Lock’s stylistic repetition underlines the
speaker’s spiritual entrapment: the speaker returns again and again to the
same words, while a lapse back into sin always follows an intimation of
grace. In Christian typology, David represented both Adam and Christ,
the second Adam whose fall or self-sacrifice would ensure salvation
(Rom. 5:14; 1 Cor. 15:22, 45). With the words “Indeed, I was born guilty,
a sinner when my mother conceived me” (Ps. 51:5, NRSV), Psalm 51
supplied important support for the Protestant view of original sin. For
Protestants, the psalm was not therefore only about David’s sin, but about
the inevitability of sin itself, a story whose major themes (of women
and temptation, lust and murder) would reappear throughout history
until the Day of Judgment. Protestant descriptions of the individual
sinner’s sanctification emphasize that original sin causes individuals to
“forget” sin despite having repented and sought God’s grace; each person
encounters each cycle of sin and repentance as a new event. Calvin finds
in the headnote to Psalm 51 an example of the cyclical logic of sin:
Express mention is made of the prophet [Nathan] having come [to

David] before the psalm was written, proving, as it were, the deep
lethargy into which David must have fallen. It was a wonderful cir-
cumstance that so great a man, and one so eminently gifted with the
Spirit, should have continued in this dangerous state for upwards of
a year. … It serves additionally to mark the supineness into which he
had fallen, that he seems to have had no compunction for his sin till
the prophet came to him.49
As Calvin remarks wonderingly, David was “eminently gifted with the

Spirit”; ordinary sinners, then, should beware of the slippery nature of
sin’s effects. John Knox also registers surprise at David’s lapse of memory
regarding his sin. He concludes that David’s experience is exemplary, for
It is very evident that Godis owne children have not at all tymes
the right knowlege of synne. … Which yf thei had, …so coulde
thei never be able (havyng alwaies that very sence of Godis wraith
against synne) to delight in any thing that apperteyneth to the flesh,
more than the woman … could ever delight in man, yf at all tymes
she felt the same panges of dolour and payne, that she doth in
hir childe birthe. And therfore doth God, for suche purposes as is
knowne to himselfe, somtyme suspende from his owne children this
forsaide sense and felinge of his wraith against synne … 50
Although Knox, like Calvin, certainly thinks of the recognition of God’s

wrath as a psychic blow that transcends gender, his choice of analogy
here is particularly appropriate to Eve’s role in the Fall. In Genesis 3:16,
God first curses the serpent, then turns to Eve: “I will greatly multiply
your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet
your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you”
(NRSV). For Knox, the decree against Eve encapsulates the contradictory
impulses to which all sinners are subject. As women forget the pain of
childbirth, so the sinner forgets the feeling of God’s wrath; but that
most unbearable pain must eventually return, this time exacerbated by
the intervening period of blithe enjoyment of sin.51 Again and again
the sinner must feel the shock of his or her debasement and become
convinced of the impossibility of deserving God’s grace.
For Lock, regeneration is not linear but cyclical; her speaker cycles
between despair and faith, sin and regeneration, purity and impurity,
and isolation and communion. Like David’s forgetfulness of sin, his
relentlessly repetitive, chaotic language demands explanation, which
Calvin gives as follows: “It is owing to the infirmity of our faith that we
are often found repeating and repeating again the same petition, not
with the view surely of gradually softening the heart of God to compas-
sion, but because we advance by slow and difficult steps to the requisite
fullness of assurance.”52 Throughout his psalm commentary, Calvin
links the apparent excess of David’s emotion to its expression in bro-
ken and repetitive language. Thus the compulsion to repeat sin and to
re-experience its traumatic effects is matched by a compulsive need for
reassurance of grace. While sin leaves traces that cannot be eradicated
and so must be relived, the assurance of grace takes hold only gradu-
ally, leaving the sinner in need of frequent reassurance. As the traumatic
memory of sin returns, the sinner loses confidence in grace, feels afresh
the wound done to the soul, and repeats the cycle.
Lock invests the historical cycle of sin and salvation, law and grace,
with complex psychological effects. Through her speaker’s individual
cycle of despair followed by tentative hope in God’s mercy, she registers
original sin as a psychic injury that causes post-traumatic effects,

including anxiety and despair. Most innovatively, she expands David’s
sin beyond Uriah’s murder to envision a multitude of sins weighing on
the speaker’s conscience and to present the speaker’s resulting need for
repeated purifications. In sonnet three, Lock’s rhetorical parallelisms
depict the circular pattern of the lamenter’s thoughts:
So foule is sinne and lothesome in thy sighte,

So foule with sinne I see my selfe to be,
That till from sinne I may be washed white,
So foule I dare not, Lord, approche to thee.
Ofte hath thy mercie washed me before,
Thou madest me cleane: but I am foule againe.
Yet washe me Lord againe, and washe me more.
Washe me, O Lord, and do away the staine
Of uggly sinnes that in my soule appere.
Let flow thy plentuous streames of clensing grace.
Washe me againe, yea washe me every where,
Bothe leprous body and defiled face.
Yea washe me all, for I am all uncleane,
And from my sin, Lord, cleanse me ones againe. (115–28)
Lock’s repetition serves the further purpose of proving the authentic-

ity of her lamenter’s experience. Calvin and others assert that the true
consciousness of sin is marked by abandonment, even an ecstasy of self-
blame; Lock’s lamenter, locked in a cycle of repetitious thought, proves
his inability fully to master himself, and thus his sainthood. Calvin
warned against a complete surrender to passionate lament, instructing
Christians to struggle against “the frailtie that is in us”; however, on this
point Lock diverges from Calvin to depict a penitent not “suspicious” of
his “sorowes, complaintes and groninges,” but embracing them (Lock
transl., 53).53 While ashamed of sin, Lock’s penitent does not hesitate
to display, as her title has it, a “passion’d mind,” showing that even the
public exposure of one’s corruption can be a kind of triumph.
Lamenting Bathsheba: Gender and Impurity
Although Lock emphasizes the universality of sin and lament with

her title “A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner,” the history of seduction
and murder told in 2 Samuel is a more important element of Lock’s
paraphrase than critics have recognized. The scriptures themselves
and much of their Christian commentary frame David’s adultery with

themes of gender, defilement, and purification. The scriptural headnote
to the psalm (in the Hebrew Bible, the first two verses) locates David’s
complaint “when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone
in to Bathsheba” (NRSV). From the Church fathers to the Reformation,
Christian interpreters elaborated the details of this story so as to deepen
readers’ understanding of the psalm, as Augustine does:
Captivated with this woman’s beauty, the wife of another, the king
and prophet David, from whose seed according to the flesh the Lord
was to come, committed adultery with her … The sin was commit-
ted, and was written down. Moreover her husband in war he caused
to be killed: and after this deed there was sent to him Nathan the
prophet; sent by the Lord, to reprove him for so great an outrage.
With each verse, Augustine encourages his audience to compare David’s

situation with their own; he demands to know of the self-satisfied:
“Art thou any wise stronger than David?”54 Similarly, the Geneva
Bible, Calvin’s psalm commentary, and the meditation on Psalm 51
by Théodore de Bèze all direct the reader to 2 Samuel, chapters 11–12.
De Bèze imagines David chastising himself for seeking to call on God
and asking himself, “having polluted thyself with so many adulterous
kisses, foule mouth, undertakest thou to name it thou enemy of al
uncleannes?”55 While in 2 Samuel David pollutes himself through
both adultery and murder, it is only adultery that the psalm headnote
mentions and on which most commentaries linger.
Although this story is clearly about men’s duties to one another, the
contaminating power of a woman’s body provides a foil for the cleaner
arts of war. Even before he first sees Bathsheba, David has exempted
himself from communal rituals meant to maintain purity by staying
behind “in the time when Kings go forthe to battle,” remaining in
Jerusalem while sending “all Israel” to the siege of Rabbah.56 Uriah’s
dedication to soldiering constitutes an implicit rebuke to David’s leisure:
he naps, strolls on his roof, and finally spies Bathsheba bathing.
In contrast, Uriah’s refusal to enter his own home highlights the purity
of the holy soldier. He demands, “The Arke of Israel, and Judah dwel in
tents: and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord abide in the open
fields: shal I then go into mine house to eat and drinke, and lie with
my wife?” (2 Sam. 11:11). Although David plies him with liquor, Uriah’s
fidelity to his fellows at arms and to the laws of ritual purity remains
unshakable.57 Uriah’s resistance to dishonoring the army of God and
symbolically betraying his male companions highlights how cynically

David exploits those warrior ethics by sending Uriah into the forefront
of battle to be killed. Against the vivid portrait of Uriah’s stubborn
righteousness, Bathsheba fades into merely a representative of feminine
impurity. The charged initial bathing scene signals her ritual purifica-
tion after menstruation, while her bed symbolizes the impurity that
Uriah must avoid as God’s soldier.
Sixteenth-century English laity knew a somewhat different version of
the story in which Bathsheba takes center stage, one conveyed by illus-
trations in Bibles and primers, or books of hours. These books included
psalms, prayers, scripture passages and commentary, church calendars,
and instruction for children. English primers were smuggled into the
country before the complete Bible was available; with the Henrician ref-
ormation they were printed in London, and Charles Butterworth notes
that under Queen Mary primers were “one of the few books allowed to
circulate in England containing portions of the Scriptures in the English
tongue.”58 English and Latin primers of 1556 and 1558 summarized the
Vulgate text with short English verses and copious, detailed illustra-
tions advertized in the title as “many prayers and goodly pictures.”59
The “goodly pictures” functioned as a textual substitute for the illiterate
or Latin illiterate; they also shaped the meaning of the psalm through
vigorous, if crude, narrative strategies. Thus, many English people would
have first “read” the story of David’s sin not in the text of 2 Samuel, but
in woodcuts in which Bathsheba is the central figure of a melodrama of
seduction, omitting Uriah and the wartime backdrop.
As Clare Costley has noted, images accompanying the Book of Psalms
in this period are dominated by scenes representing Bathsheba bathing
under David’s observation.60 While the primers’ contents change with
the shifting religious settlements of succeeding monarchs, Bathsheba’s
association with the Psalms does not vary. Editions of the Great Bible
of 1539, 1540, and 1541 included two identical images in which
Bathsheba, standing in a tub in the foreground, leans backwards to dis-
play her naked body while graciously accepting a message from King
David, who appears in a window in the background.61 The same image
introduces both George Joye’s English translation of Martin Bucer’s
Latin Psalter (The Psalter of David in English, [1544], Figure 2.1) and
the English and Latin primer licensed under Queen Mary (The Primer
in English and Latin, after Salisbury Use, 1555 and 1556). In an English
and Latin primer of 1533, David’s messenger and a passer-by stare at
Bathsheba’s naked body from below, while she and King David stretch
out their hands towards one another from opposite balconies (Figure 2.2).
43
Figure 2.1 George Joye, transl., The Psalter of David in English [1544], A1v–A2r. Reproduced by kind permission of the Rare Book &
Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Symbols including a chained monkey and a mirror cue the viewer to

read lust and vanity into Bathsheba’s bath, so that an event symbolizing
purification in the Bible (although also the necessity of purification)
becomes a rite of self-indulgence in the primers (Figures 2.2, 2.3).
Such representations of naked Bathsheba probably reminded viewers of
the nakedness of Eve; in the first authorized English primer, the text’s
only illustration underlines that association by placing an apple in
Bathsheba’s palm (Figure 2.3). While Protestant commentaries on the
penitential psalms explore David’s shame, leaving Bathsheba’s guilt or
innocence unmentioned, these widespread images create a persuasive
narrative about Bathsheba’s sexual complicity, implying that her pen-
chant for seductive self-display provoked David’s crimes. Despite the
psalms’ rhetoric of individual guilt, which seems to indicate David’s
complete abjection, Reformation readers were familiar with a counter-
narrative that placed the original burden of sin on Bathsheba, the
impure and irresistible public woman, and her foremother, Eve.
Despite the fame of Psalm 51’s Davidic context, Lock describes her
speaker as “a penitent sinner,” an apparently universal role. Scholars
have generally agreed that Lock avoids gendering her speaker, pre-
sumably in order rhetorically to welcome women as well as men into
the communion of saints.62 Rosalind Smith, for example, contrasts
Lock’s approach with Wyatt’s careful characterization of David in his
paraphrase of Psalm 51:
[Lock’s] reworking of Wyatt shifts from his third-person, descriptive

observation of David, to a first-person expansion on the now gender-
less penitent sinner’s subjective experience of sin. This shift stresses
the individual’s interaction with God in line with Calvinist theology,
and provides by default or omission a subject position available to
readers of both genders.63
As Smith observes, Lock’s “genderless” persona allows any reader to

identify with David. Similarly, Kimberly Coles argues that Lock’s own
voice is displaced by the voices of David and Hezekiah.64 However,
while Lock encourages any reader to immerse him- or herself in the
poem’s first-person narrative, she plants specific references to Bathsheba
as well as David alongside the speaker’s ungendered self-references,
supplying her persona with both masculine and feminine attributes.65
I argue that Lock embeds signs of gender difference that overdetermine
the speaker’s gender, pointing sometimes towards a feminine and some-
times a masculine role.
Figure 2.2 Catholic Church, This Prymer of Salisbury Use, 1533, Classmark:
Syn.8.53.97, O4r. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge
University Library.
Figure 2.3 Church of England, The Primer, Set Foorth by the Kynges Maiestie and
his Clergie, 1545, Classmark: Syn.7.54.46, H4v. Reproduced by kind permission
of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
Lock creates a specifically sexual past for her lamenter, keeping before
our eyes the sins of adultery and murder and, implicitly, the figures of
David and Bathsheba. Her speaker’s sins are first and foremost sexual
ones, described as “foule delight,” “lewd delight,” and “lust and foule
delight” (149, 289, 292). The speaker guilty of “foule delight” is most
obviously David, but, given Bathsheba’s temptress role in English primers,
she could also be expected to voice such regrets. Lock’s repeated gestures
towards the sexual nature of the speaker’s sins set the stage for the
speaker’s offering God the sacrifice of “a broken spirit” in sonnet 19.
Now, when the speaker avers that “I offer up my ghoste, / My slayne
delightes, my dyeng hart to thee,” we recognize the renunciation of a
sexual past (340–41). Lock’s use of Petrarchan imagery draws on these
allusions to suggest that the speaker’s love of Christ will transform his
(or her) licentious heart to “a new pure hart within my brest,” now lov-
ingly bound to God “With fast affiance and assured sway” (245, 283).
Together, the themes of sexual sin and of the old and new heart culmi-
nate in the final sonnet, a triumphant vision of the New Jerusalem in
which the communion of saints gathers to sacrifice joyously “Many a
yelden host of humbled hart” (372). Through wordplay on “hart/heart,”
Lock promises that the new, pure hearts of the saints will replace the
“dyeing hart” associated with sexual license, the animal sacrifice men-
tioned in the psalm, and the sacrifice of the Catholic Mass reviled
by Protestants.66 Her intricate weaving of tropes here creates a new
context for Bathsheba’s transgressively public body: Bathsheba’s sins,
like David’s, can be “slayne,” and Lock replaces the famous bath that
signally failed to purify her with the spiritual baptism of verse 7: “wash
me and I shalbe whiter than snow” (51:7, Lock).
Although Psalm 51 suggests that the mother has a special role in the
transmission of sin (“in sinne my mother conceived me,” 51:7, Lock),
Lock stresses both genders:
For lo, in sinne, Lord, I begotten was,

With sede and shape my sinne I toke also,
Sinne is my nature and my kinde alas,
In sinne my mother me conceived: Lo
I am but sinne, and sinfull ought to dye,
Dye in his wrath that hath forbydden sinne.
Such bloome and frute loe sinne doth multiplie,
Such was my roote, such is my juyse within.
I plead not this as to excuse my blame,
On kynde or parentes myne owne gilt to lay:
But by disclosing of my sinne, my shame,

And nede of helpe, the plainer to displaye
Thy mightie mercy, if with plenteous grace
My plenteous sinnes it please thee to deface. (171–84)
As Hannibal Hamlin observes, Lock is unusual in implying that both

parents transmit original sin to a child.67 She begins her paraphrase with
the patriarchal adjective “begotten”; in the next line, “sede” suggests
the father’s contribution and “shape” the mother’s, while Lock’s speaker
“took” sin with both parents, but also from “kynde or parentes,” suggest-
ing the unwilling complicity of generations of ancestors.68 While David
was a type of Adam, Bathsheba was a type of Eve; thus Lock reminds read-
ers of women’s role in the inception of sin itself as well as the conception
of sinners, but refuses to stress women’s blame. Instead, her paired images
(“sede and shape,” “bloome and frute,” and “roote” and “juyse”) emphasize
the ingrained and irresistible nature of sin, moving beyond the scripture’s
immediate context of women’s role in conception. Lock then reminds her
readers that her purpose is to turn the flowering plant of sin inside out, to
expose seed, shape, bloom, fruit, root, and sap, and “by disclosing of my
sinne, my shame,” to “displaye / Thy mightie mercy.” Here, the theme of
exposure mirrors the display of Bathsheba’s shamefully desirable body in
2 Samuel, as well as Adam and Eve’s recognition of their nakedness; Lock
revalues both these moments by celebrating the disclosure of shame.
Although Lock’s paraphrase resists the sole attribution of original
sin to women’s sexuality and mothers’ role in generation, she returns
unexpectedly to the theme of maternity and sin when paraphrasing the
verse “Deliver me from bloud o God, God of my helth and my tong
shall joyfullye talke of thy justice” (Lock, Ps 51:14):
O God, God of my health, my saving God,

Have mercy Lord, and shew thy might to save.
Assoile me, God, from gilt of giltlesse blod,
And eke from sinne that I ingrowyng have
By fleshe and bloud and by corrupted kinde.
Upone my bloud and soule extende not, Lorde,
Vengeance for bloud, but mercy let me finde,
And strike me not with thy revyngyng sworde.
So, Lord, my joying tong shall talke thy praise,
Thy name my mouth shall utter in delight,
My voice shall sounde thy justice, and thy waies,
Thy waies to justifie thy sinfull wight.
God of my health, from bloud I saved so

Shall spred thy prayse for all the world to know. (297–310)
In its third line, this sonnet paraphrases the psalm’s most direct allusion
to 2 Samuel with “Assoile me, God, from gilt of giltlesse blod” (299).
This is the “giltlesse blod” of Uriah (and those killed with him, as the
Geneva gloss observes), which places the speaker momentarily back in
David’s skin and the narrative of 2 Samuel. However, Lock immediately
shifts our perspective by expanding “deliver me from blood” to encom-
pass both David’s act of murder and original sin itself, adding “And eke
from sinne that I ingrowying have / By fleshe and bloud and by corrupted
kinde” (301).69 Lock’s choice of this strange metaphor deserves further
scrutiny, for the speaker seems to be pregnant with sin. Lock may have
imbibed this imagery from biblical echoes such as we have seen above
in Knox, who compares the human aptitude for forgetting sins to God’s
words to Eve and mothers’ forgetfulness of the pangs of childbirth.
Since Lock has shown us sin growing from seed to shape in the womb
in sonnet seven, this “sinne that I ingrowyng have” calls up a similar
image: now the speaker is metaphorically pregnant with sin, and her
“flesh and blood” and “corrupted kinde” are both her progenitors and
her corrupt issue. The “giltlesse blod” of the original verse reverberates
through Lock’s sonnet, ringing changes on its symbolic meaning with
each repetition. From the innocent blood of Uriah, blood comes to
symbolize the ancestral heritage of original sin (“By fleshe and bloud and
by corrupted kinde”), the speaker and her children (as “innocent” victims
of original sin “upon my bloud and soule”), and the crimes themselves
of which the inheritors of original sin are both perpetrators and victims
(“Vengeance for bloud”; “from bloud I saved so”). Out of this welter of
bodily connotations, no single persona emerges for the speaker, who
could be David lamenting his murder of Uriah, Bathsheba complaining
of the burden of original sin that she is doomed to pass on to the
“giltlesse blod” of her child, or a universal sinner with whom anyone
can identify. What is consistent is the salutary effect of exposure: sin is
internal, a private festering that only the form of lament can cure by
turning “sinne that I ingrowyng have” outward with a “joying tongue”
that will “utter in delight” God’s praise.
Through nuanced changes in the speaker’s posture towards God, Lock
implies the eventual end to these cycles in the saints’ communal union
with God. In the deceitful world of lament psalms, hypocrisy is the rule;
the godly and ungodly can only be distinguished by the all-seeing eye of
God. Yet each speaker’s utter isolation links him to the people of Israel by
symbolizing the unique bond between God and his chosen people and
suggesting their childlike dependence on divine aid. By reading the psalms
as laments, Protestants participated in a kind of communal privacy. The
Protestant conception of the church accorded well with the Psalms’ social
world, in which pervasive deceit and hypocrisy leave righteous persons
isolated. Moreover, the doctrine of justification by faith emphasized
that outward acts could not testify to a person’s inward righteousness.
Luther taught that the true church consisted in the community of the
faithful rather than a worldly institution.70 Each godly person might be
surrounded by enemies both internally, as terrors of conscience struck
him or her, and externally, as the forces of the Antichrist obstructed the
practice of godly worship and the peace of the faithful.
Despite this grisly picture of non-conformist Protestant experience,
the knowledge that other godly persons were, by definition, equally
isolated created a sense of unity. John Calvin interpreted Psalm 102:17,
“He hath had an eye to the prayer of the solitary, and hath not despised
their prayers,” to show that the faithful prayed in isolation but, at the
same time, as one congregation:
… all the Jews, so long as they remained ejected from their own
country, and lived as exiles in a strange land, are called solitary, because,
although the countries of Assyria and Chaldea were remarkably fertile
and delightful, yet these wretched captives, as I have previously
observed, wandered there as in a wilderness. And as at that time this
solitary people obtained favour by sighing, so now when the faithful
are scattered, and are without their regular assemblies, the Lord
will hear their groanings in this desolate dispersion, provided they
all with one consent, and with unfeigned faith, earnestly breathe
after the restoration of the Church.71
The Jews, Calvin asserts, could be called “solitary” by virtue of their

outcast state; similarly, even in Protestant England the faithful would
be “solitary” until the defeat of the Antichrist embodied in the Catholic
Church. Although isolated, the godly groan as one and “all with one
consent” “earnestly breathe after the restoration of the church.” Lock
also envisioned the unity of the saints through voices raised in unison
when she paraphrased Psalm 51:18’s wish that “the walles of Hierusalem
may be bylded” (Lock). Lock interprets these walls as the church itself,
soon to be visible to an awed audience:
That trembling at thy power the world may know

It is upholden by thy mighty hand:
That Sion and Hierusalem may be

A safe abode for them that honor thee.
[21]
Then on thy hill, and in thy walled towne,
Thou shalt receave the pleasing sacrifice,
The brute shall of thy praised name resoune
In thankfull mouthes … (363–70)
Both Calvin and Lock imagine the church as one united voice, and
Calvin would surely agree to Lock’s vision of the New Jerusalem as
a newly public church. The fugitive, invisible church would become a
“city on a hill,” the exemplary object of the world’s gaze. This “Sion and
Hierusalem” seem to have been often before the eyes of Lock’s circle;
Dering’s marriage proposal to Lock is preserved in a letter that notes
that, should she “like better other where,” he will hope that “when
we shall have better eies that shalbe able to se God, our faythe shall
lead us both into a happye societie.”72 Lock provides a clue to how she
envisioned that “happye societie” in her 1590 dedicatory letter to the
Countess of Warwick:
everie one in his calling is bound to doo somewhat to the further-

ance of the holie building, but because great things by reason of
my sex I may not doo, and that which I may I ought to doo, I have
according to my duetie brought my poore basket of stones to the
strengthning of the walles of that Jerusalem whereof (by grace)
wee are all both citizens and members.73
Scholars are divided over whether this quotation reveals Lock winc-
ing under the restrictions of patriarchy, or merely going through the
motions of the humility topos. Whether her final phrase, “the walles
of that Jerusalem whereof (by grace) wee are all both citizens and
members,” reflects antipathy to the sexual inequality of her time is an
intriguing, but probably unanswerable, question. She might instead have
been thinking of her sense of alienation from mainstream Elizabethan
church or court circles. We can, however, note that for Lock, the vision
of the New Jerusalem is one of unity and equality in the present; “wee,”
the godly, are all citizens of the same invisible polity and members
of the same body. I have argued that Lock’s purpose in “A Meditation”
is to depict the great comfort of a repentant sinner’s private encounter
with God; but she also anticipates the erasure of the difference between
private and public worship when the walls of Jerusalem are complete
and private laments become public praise.
3
Privacy and Gender in Household
Orders
In 1953, W. G. Hoskins profoundly shaped our current understanding

of early modern privacy when he identified the Great Rebuilding,
a boom in residential remodeling of the 1570s to 1640s, as an
effect of a new desire for privacy that had filtered down from the
aristocracy to yeomen farmers. A massive remodeling of England,
the Great Rebuilding replaced medieval halls, large spaces for com-
munal living and dining, with two-storied houses of many smaller,
specialized rooms. Such small rooms, according to Hoskins, enabled
a “withdrawal from communal life,” first for the master of the family
and later for everyone else.1 This concept suits our modern sense that
privacy involves freedom from others’ surveillance or knowledge; it
also implies that prior to the Great Rebuilding, privacy had not been
valued in the same way. Lena Cowen Orlin revises this narrative by
arguing that the desire for privacy competed with an equally strong
value placed on surveillance as a guarantor of order. Some of the
changes in domestic architecture characteristic of the Great Rebuilding,
she convincingly demonstrates, enhanced opportunities to observe
others.2 This chapter examines domestic privacy from a new point
of view: the relations between masters (or mistresses) and servants
represented by household orders, or manuscript lists of directions to
servants. Household regulations suggest that privacy involved carefully
managing proximity to others; it was achieved not through isolation,
but by presenting oneself to public view surrounded by one’s supporters
at rigorously specified distances. I will argue that the seventeenth
century saw an increasing focus on privacy defined by the omnipre-
sence of attractive and gracious attendants, which replaced elaborate
ceremonies and the mutual gaze of master and servant as rituals
defining aristocratic mastery.
52
Privacy and Gender in Household Orders 53
The carefully preserved “privacy” of seventeenth-century householders

involved taking a prominent position at the apex of a hierarchy of
increasing privilege, observed by many, while closely accompanied by a
select few. Often, when writers of household orders mention “privacy,”
they are referring to a traditional status marker compatible with what
C. M. Woolgar refers to as “public living” in late medieval households:
“Separation was a mark of status and honour, not of modesty.”3 The
lord did not seek to escape others’ gazes, but to increase the scarcity, and
thus the value, of access to his presence. Patricia Fumerton describes
such early modern displays of domestic privacy as “privacy exhibited
in public,” and Alan Stewart identifies the most inward of inner rooms,
the closet, as “a place of utter privacy, of total withdrawal from the
public sphere of the household” that “simultaneously functions as a
very public gesture of withdrawal, a very public sign of privacy.”4 Such
approaches reflect the complexity of domestic privacy in this period and
highlight its performative dimension. Privacy in this sense meant not
freedom from observation, but an act excluding some and privileging
others.5 The 1526 Eltham household orders of Henry VIII demonstrate
a concern for this kind of privacy:
Considering that right mean persons, as well for their more com-
modity do retire and withdraw themselves sometimes apart … it is
convenient, that the King’s Highness have his privy chamber and
inward lodgings reserved secret, at the pleasure of his grace, without
repair of any great multitude thereunto; it is therefore ordained, that
no person, of what estate, degree, or condition soever he be, from
henceforth presume, attempt, or be in any wise suffered or admitted
to come or repair into the King’s privy chamber; other then such
only as his grace shall from time to time call for or command; except
only the ministers now deputed … being in all the number of fifteen
persons, whom the King’s grace, for their good behavior and qualities
hath elected for that purpose.6
An entourage of 15 constitutes the king’s “secret” and “inward” retire-

ment, a “privacy” hardly recognizable as such now, but nonetheless
crucial to the king’s honor. The privacy of the great was inherently
paradoxical, for a king would be at all times the focus of attention. The
throngs surrounding Henry marked his importance; removing himself
from view altogether would be as unsuitable as mixing freely with
all comers. Such assertions of privacy were both highly conscious of an
observing audience and embedded in a network of established formal
conventions. Household lords and masters wished their moments

of relative seclusion to be witnessed by the servants whose presence
confirmed their status, as well as by a larger public of observers of this
well-attended privacy, including readers of the household orders circu-
lated among great families.
This chapter examines a form of domestic writing known to social
historians, but rich in rhetorical and formal qualities not yet discussed by
scholars. Known variously as household orders, ordinances, regulations,
or statutes, these manuscripts were essentially lists of rules addressed
by a master (or, rarely, a mistress) to his or her servants, ranging from
one to sixty or more folio sheets. Over the course of the seventeenth
century, I argue, household orders increased in rhetorical ambition,
becoming less focused on concrete rules and ceremonies and more
theoretical and persuasive in representing household governance. Later
household orders often reach beyond mere listing of rules to express a
philosophy of mastery and service; some attempt to define the nature of
service, the importance of large households to the nation, or the subject
position of household masters. These later orders present an idealized
notion of the household as an affective community, bonded by love
and nurturing manly virtue. A householder’s status as master had
once been affirmed through domestic ceremonies and rituals. Now more
subtle, but equally taxing, forms of distinction such as courtesy, grace, and
privacy were recognized. In household orders we see masters and their
representatives struggling to evoke proper affect in servants and to
accomplish the dance of privacy that Stewart and Fumerton describe
above. These documents show us how the servants themselves, even
more than the arrangement of rooms, reflect their masters’ status by
performing privacy for the benefit of observers. However, in household
orders, masters also perform their “private” status for servants, who
play at least three different roles: suspected overhearers and voyeurs,
members of an intimate audience emotionally bound to their masters,
and a decorative frame presenting the aristocratic family to the wider
public. This dance of privacy was even more intricately choreographed
on the rare occasions when the orders were written for a mistress rather
than a master, as we will see.
Although the orders purport to express the wishes of the master
of the household and were usually signed by him, actual authorship
was normally delegated to a steward or secretary. Morgan Coleman, by
his own account a “poore decaied gentleman; one of thee fraternitie of His
Majestis Hospitall, at the Charterhouse,” claims credit for the household
orders of Lionel Cranfield, first Earl of Middlesex (1575–1645), dated
1622.7 Before his “decay,” Coleman was a well-connected secretary;

according to the Huntington Library catalog, he “served in succession
Lord Willioughby de Eresby, Lord Keeper Sir John Puckering, Lord
Keeper Sir Thomas Egerton, and Robert Cecil Earl of Salisbury.” Here,
he presents himself as a channel for his lord’s sentiments. He explains
his purpose to the servants:
Your Right honorable Lord, and mine, desireous you should serve
hym, and yor Lady, in a commendable fashion of conformetie;
hath thought it most convenient, for the better settlinge, and gov-
ernement of his Lord:s said houshould (hym selfe unhable to attend
the busins). that some fitt course to the purpose should bee devisede:
And therefore hath been pleased >to appoint< mee (thoe unhablest
of many) to conceive some orders, and direciones to that purpose.
(fol. 46)
Although usually written by a servant and addressed to servants, house-

hold orders attempt to convey a master’s authority. The orders addressed
each class of servant in descending order from steward to kitchen
boy, describing daily or hourly duties, establishing complex chains of
command, and identifying rewards for each class of servant and punish-
ments for possible infractions. The orders were often drawn up in
ceremonial script and kept in a central office to be consulted or read
aloud to the family periodically.8 Thus one of their basic functions was
to comprise a sort of family constitution, a set of rules that might be
used to resolve procedural disputes. Moreover, periodic public reading
of the rules was a communal ritual intended to draw the family together
and remind them of shared ideals.
Historians have treated household orders as legible traces of past domestic
practices, reflecting their writers’ personal preferences and beliefs. In this
sense, they seem to be private texts, written not for broad circulation but as
a communication to specific intended readers on subjects of practical daily
utility within the setting of a single household. If that were the case, we
might expect each householder’s instructions to servants to be unique, and
in fact each set of orders usually contains unique requests, while also obey-
ing conventions of style and substance. Nevertheless, intrinsic and extrinsic
evidence shows that household orders circulated both within extended fami-
lies and in wider aristocratic and gentry circles. The interconnections among
the relatively few (20 or so) extant non-royal early modern household orders
indicates that copying and circulation of orders were common practices, and
thus that writers would have kept a wider audience in mind.
The Cranfield orders written by Morgan Coleman in 1621–22 provide

an instructive example of the circulation of household orders. At least
four versions survive; the original seems to be Lambeth Palace Library’s
elaborately engrossed manuscript, which is initialed throughout by
Cranfield and his steward. A copy preserved in the Huntington Library,
dated June 13, 1622 and initialed “LC” in several places, could have
been one of those distributed to officers in the Cranfield household.9
However, these orders traveled beyond the household: a third set, dated
1628 and titled “sett downe for the better direction and ordering of the
house of the right reverend Father in God the Lord Archbishop of Yorke,
his Graces house and service,” is a largely verbatim copy.10 These orders
leave blanks for the signature of the Archbishop, the exact date in 1628,
and the name of the steward to whom they were to be delivered. They
were probably drawn up for the newly appointed Archbishop George
Mountain (or Montaign, 1569–1628), who had no chance to assume
the headship of his new household because he died on the day of his
enthronement in 1628. The orders could have reached Mountain in any
number of ways, such as through the Charterhouse Hospital, where he
had been a governor and Morgan Coleman a pensioner.11
The fourth version of the Cranfield orders is titled “The Duke of
Buckinghams charge Ordering his household” and dated 1633, when
George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham (1628–87), was only 5 or
6 years old and living in the royal nursery at Richmond.12 The manuscript
provides vague hints of a story about family authority and the work of
household orders in establishing noble social position. Again, there are
many possible routes of transmission: the first Duke of Buckingham,
who was assassinated in 1628, had been Cranfield’s patron, enabling the
merchant’s meteoric and much-resented political rise. Cranfield married
the first duke’s first cousin, Anne Brett, in 1620, and Buckingham
bought Cranfield’s London home, Wallingford House, during his
client’s impeachment in 1626. Although the title allots authority to
the young duke, the orders are signed at the end by the Duchess of
Buckingham and dated 1634. The orders make no internal reference
to a female head of household, but several sections are signed with
“K. Buckingham.” Did the duchess have Cranfield’s orders copied in
order to assert her identity as Buckingham’s widow and female head of
the family before her controversial second marriage? If so, she is the only
woman, royal or noble, to authorize such extensive and detailed house-
hold orders. Perhaps she commissioned the copying of these household
orders to formalize what she hoped would be her son’s return as titular
head of her household; in his absence, she signed the orders herself, but
then failed to gain custody of her son. If this is so, then these orders, like
those of the Archbishop of York, record dashed hopes for a successfully
established household. While they celebrate the stability of one house-
hold governed by one master, the history of the Cranfield orders bears
witness to the fragility of household mastery. They survived the collapse
of Cranfield’s fortunes and the assassination of his patron to represent,
in turn, both the never-to-be-realized household of the Archbishop of
York and the apparently imaginary household of the second Duke of
Buckingham, to which I will return below.
Writers refer both implicitly and explicitly to knowledge of other
households’ ordinances; for example, the 1609 orders of Henry
Hastings, fifth Earl of Huntingdon (1586–1643), and his wife Lady
Elizabeth Hastings (née Stanley) allude to “advise of their friends,
examples of persons of their owne ranke, and … their owne diligent
observations (having some fewe yeares past ben house-keepers)” as
inspiration for setting down their orders.13 These friends and examples
probably included Lady Elizabeth’s stepfather Thomas Egerton, Baron
Ellesmere and first Viscount Brackley (1540?–1617), whose 1609 orders
remained in the Egerton family papers now at the Huntington Library;
and perhaps her great-grandfather and grandfather, the third and fourth
Earls of Derby, whose household orders of 1561 and 1587 have survived
as well.14 The Egerton family papers also include anonymous household
orders dated 1605/06, another copy of which remained until 1800
among the papers of the Marquess of Donegall’s estate.15 Lord and Lady
Huntingdon’s 1609 orders may in their turn have been read by Lady
Elizabeth’s nephew John Egerton, second Earl of Bridgewater (1622–86),
whose 1652 orders copy some sections of his grandfather’s 1603 orders.16
Thus household orders circulated within and beyond families and
alliance networks. Seventeenth-century orders must then have been
written with several audiences in mind; they not only recorded a family’s
domestic habits, but also portrayed to the household and the wider
public the scale of a householder’s domestic ambition and his worthi-
ness for the weighty role of lord and master.
From Ritual to Courtesy: Medieval and Early Modern

Household Orders
A look at key differences between medieval and seventeenth-century

orders will help us to understand how early modern householders imi-
tated the medieval past. There are relatively few extant medieval and
sixteenth-century household orders, and most describe royal households.
Surviving sixteenth-century copies suggest that medieval orders interested

the same class of persons – secretaries, stewards, comptrollers, and other
chief officers – who might themselves in turn write household orders.17
Many household orders allude to “the old order of England,” under
which, in theory, great households modeled social harmony.18 A set of
manuscript orders by “R. B.,” apparently intended for circulation, laments
“the patrimony of many noble houses wasted and decayed,” and returns
repeatedly to the thesis that the institution of the great household
has declined: “noble men in these daies (for the most parte) like better to
be served with pages and groomes, then in that estate which belongeth
to their degrees” (7, 11).19 At the same time, seventeenth-century orders
responded to new pressures and fresh views about aristocratic patriarchy.
Most importantly for my purposes, the contrasts between medieval and
seventeenth-century orders suggest that while privacy’s role as a way of
exhibiting status was continuous throughout both ages, methods for
displaying this privileged privacy changed.
The reverence that medieval household orders aimed to inspire is
evident in the Liber Niger of Edward IV (c. 1471–72), which begins with
an illustration of the ideal royal household based on a very free inter-
pretation of the Queen of Sheba’s visit to King Solomon in the Bible
(2 Chron. 9:1–9). According to the Liber Niger, the Queen marveled not
only at Solomon’s servants themselves but also at the directions that
ruled them:
the sad and studious directions the orders of officers formed in estate,
and degrees … every master officer in his sober demeaning, his
honesty, his rich array, and of all their mannerly ceremonies done in
that court, that each of them might be likened to a king in her country,
also for the steadfast observance of the good rules, appointments and
ordinances for the household.20
Apparently, not Solomon’s wealth but his household orders so impressed

the Queen of Sheba that “there was no more spirit left in her” (NRSV,
2 Chron. 9:4). The Liber Niger’s language conveys the ideal of a wonder-
fully harmonious community that many household orders strove to
achieve. Key to attaining this ideal are “mannerly ceremonies” and
“good rules, appointments and ordinances.” Medieval orders thus
attempt to generate household unity by establishing complex rituals
and gestures that indicate status distinctions and bind the household
together through communal activity.
Primary among these ceremonies is the dining of the lord in the hall,
where the mutual gaze of lord and men and the sharing of food foster
intimacy while maintaining hierarchy. The thirteenth-century house-
hold orders of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (c. 1170–1253),
command that “in no wyse be in the howseholde men debatefulle or
stryffulle, but that alle be of oon a-corde, of oon wylle, even like as in
them ys one mynde and oon sowle.”21 Grosseteste recommends gestures
that will both demonstrate and produce a sense of common identity,
such as the lord’s dining among his men in the hall. The lord should
give meat from his plate to those near him and to servants who have
especially pleased him, even if the food is the same as they already have
on their plates (330). The unity of the hall community is paramount:
make ye youre own howseholde to sytte in the [hall], as much as ye

mow or may, … and lette them sitte to-gedur as mony as may, not
here fowr and thre there … Streytly for-bede ye that no wyfe be
at youre mete. And sytte ye ever in the myddul of the hye borde, that
youre [visage] and chere be schewyd to alle men of bothe partyes,
and that ye may see lyghtly the servicis and defawtis. (329)
Grosseteste’s orders confirm household community by the sharing of

meat, the reciprocal gaze between master and men, and an exclusion of
women that affirms the priority of male bonds.
Surviving medieval orders focus extensively on elaborate ceremonies
at meals in the hall and at festivals like the enthroning of an arch-
bishop, the christening of a royal child, or the celebration of Twelfth
Night.22 This interest in ceremony extends to the minutiae of everyday
life as well; even the making of the lord’s bed demanded complex
rituals. The manuscript titled “Of the State of a Duke, Marquis and
Earl in their own Houses,” dated to the fifteenth century, requires that
even though only the yeomen ushers and grooms are present when
they prepare the lord’s bedchamber, they must do so bareheaded,
bowing and kissing their hands repeatedly as they touch each item
of the bedclothes, and bowing to the bed while leaving the room.23
The orders for Grosseteste, for the enthronement of the Archbishop
of York, and for Henry Algernon Percy, fifth Earl of Northumberland
(1478–1527) overflow with the kind of acts praised in Edward IV’s
Liber Niger as “mannerly ceremonies” and “ordinate reverences.”24 The
ceremonial service of a meal in the hall of the medieval Archbishop
of York involved a complex pattern of cleaning, tasting, covering and
uncovering, flourishing, and coming and going by various household

officers, as in this sample:
then the Table cleansed, the Carver must take with his brode knyfe
a litle of the uppermost Trencher, and geve it to the Panter to eate
for thassay thereof, and of the Bread geue assay in lyke maner: then
uncouer your Salt, and with a cornet of Breade touch it in four partes,
and with your hande make a floryshe ouer it, and geue it the Panter
to eate for thassaye therof, who goeth his way, then cleanse the Table
cleane …25
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century orders do occasionally ask servants

to perform ceremonial gestures; for example, several require reverence
towards the lord’s meat. The 1595 orders of Anthony Maria Browne,
second Viscount Montagu (1574–1629), command his clerk of the
kitchen to ensure that no groom or boy turns his back on the viscount’s
meat as it turns on the spit.26 However, in later orders, ceremony has
generally receded behind a pervasive concern with courtesy that calls not
for elaborate gestures or rites, but for a gracious demeanor and hand-
some dress.
While invoking the tradition of medieval great households,
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century orders use a new language of
decorum that owes more to Castiglione’s The Courtier than to the
“mannerly ceremonies” of the Black Book. “R. B.” complains about the
aristocratic desire for mannerly, physically attractive servants: “of later
yeares Earles and Ladies have better liked yonge gentlemen that were
neate and fine in their apparell, to serve them,” rather than older and
better-trained men.27 The Cranfield orders and their imitators attempt
to define courteous behavior for each class of servant. Discourteous
actions include not only “Dishonest communication, uncivell clamor,
provokeing speeches, depravinges, comparinges quarrellinges fightinge
souing of Discord, offensive harmfull jestinge” and “foolishe flouttinge,”
but also loose lips: while serving at table yeomen and grooms are to “not
stand gazing nor listening to what is said or spoken, nor report abroad
what speeches are there uttered.”28 The orders consider which breaches
of courtesy might arise in each office and give specific warnings to each
class of servants, pre-empting ordinary situations in which servants
might be tempted into incivility. For example, the yeoman usher may
find other servants resisting his call for silence at dinner, but “Hee must
not use many wordes nor be moved to coller allthough any should
be soe rude or inconsiderate as to revile or abuse him: but presentlie
(in quiet calme manner) must acquaint the gen. usher therewith, whoe
shall beare him upp in his service.”29 These seventeenth-century orders
demonstrate a lively interest in the nuances of social dynamics within
a hierarchy and in how peace may be maintained in spite of conflicting
interests and social competition.
This interest in social dynamics is matched by a concern with the
interior states of individual servants. Seventeenth-century orders reveal
a steep rise in rhetorical ambition, as texts attempt to justify the house-
holder’s ways to his men. Perhaps the new focus on justifying mastership
results from the decline in the prestige of service that seventeenth-
century writers like “R. B.” perceived.30 Medieval ordinances are usually
quite straightforward lists of the “mannerly ceremonies” and “ordinate
observances” to be observed on specific occasions. Even though they may
be highly detailed and complex, the ordinances do not aim farther than
simply setting out proper procedure, at the very most announcing the
punishments to be expected if certain rules are broken. In the seven-
teenth century, however, we find prologues and epilogues exhorting
servants not only to obey orders but to internalize them, reminding
servants of their master’s care for them, of their duty to return his love,
and of the interdependence of all levels in the hierarchy.31 Although the
lord no longer dines in the hall under his servants’ observation, unity
becomes a more prominent subject of discussion. The orders attempt to
persuade servants that they owe their masters not only obedience, but
gratitude and love. Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon, justifies his
regulations of 1609 as the means
to th’end that every officer may the more surely be established

and authorized in the execution of his place, without controlment,
for doing his duty, and every other hold themselves satisfied with
their doing according to their orders, and learn thereby to demean
themselves, as well particularly to officers, as also generally one to
another. (ital. mine)32
The orders’ language of satisfaction and freedom from “controlment”

stresses lords’ and servants’ mutual stake in an orderly, contented com-
munity. Such harmony carries further reward for the householder,
as it confirms his natural right to lead such a household, creating a
highly respectable frame of courteous servants for his public persona
as landed aristocrat. Gone from seventeenth-century ordinances are
discussions of the salutary effect of the master’s gaze on his subordinates;
these orders are more concerned with the gaze of imagined observers.
Thus, Renaissance orders imaginatively constructed an ideal household

in order to fashion servants in its image, beckoning them to join in a
dance of decorous participation that would set off their lord to best
advantage.
In their partly instructional, partly hortatory discourse on courtesy,
household orders bear a close relation to Renaissance courtesy and
advice literature. This literature, which itself originated in medieval
instructions for servants in great households, included courtesy books
and manuals on marriage and family that attempted to reform the mores
of the English people by shaping the conduct of daily life in the home.
Like such advice literature, household orders promote an ideal of affec-
tive unity achieved through clear distinction of rank and duties among
household members. In both household orders and advice literature,
each role in the household hierarchy is addressed separately, empha-
sizing the rigidity of the family hierarchy. In both, cheerful obedience
towards one’s superiors and kind but firm regulation of one’s inferiors
build contentment within the family, whether the relations described
are between upper and lower servants, husband and wife, or master
and servant. Frank Whigham and Harry Berger, Jr. have shown that
courtesy literature operates either to open up or to close off spaces for
social aspirants: in the hands of elites, it justified social exclusion, while
tutoring aspirants in the skills required for admission to polite society.33
Thus, courtesy literature structured a discourse on self-fashioning and
its limits by suggesting that identity could be reduced to a set of behaviors
designed to manipulate one’s audience. However, household orders
differ in some ways from advice literature intended for a largely middle-
class print market. Household orders encode the cultural aspirations of
the English aristocracy; here, the problem of self-presentation is posed
as a reciprocal mirroring of status between a community of servants
and their masters. The audience to self-presentation is more complex
than in courtesy literature, as servants display courtesy for their masters’
benefit and the civil conversation of the whole family forms an implicit
basis for the master’s claim to the status of a great householder.
Household orders sought to create an impressive frame of attractive,
high-status attendants whose presence would demonstrate the household-
er’s own good taste and, implicitly, his wealth and power. Unlike medieval
orders, seventeenth-century orders assume that servants possess leisure
time for games and other forms of entertainment. They encourage serv-
ants to indulge themselves in a decorous fashion and to avoid “great play”
or high-stakes wagering. Gambling and drinking are more complex top-
ics for Renaissance orders than for their medieval models, because social
expectations now required conspicuous leisure from gentlemen serv-

ants. The pursuit of pleasure was the prerogative of the gentry, and their
servants’ leisure to pursue civil amusements demonstrated the status of
seventeenth-century nobility. Although one important purpose of house-
hold orders was to limit expenditures by regulating the consumption
of food and drink, the orders specify that these rules should be relaxed
during visits by outsiders, since some amount of revelry was an essential
part of hospitality.34 On these occasions, guests and servants gathered
to enjoy the beneficence of the householder, who strove to present an
image of open-handedness. When guests are present, household orders
specifically license servants to drink more, to gamble, and to entertain
strangers unstintingly, without, as the orders of James Brydges, 1st Duke
of Chandos, (1673–1744) stipulate, “suffering the Liberty allowed in those
Cases to be abused,and become the occasion of any Irregularities.”35
Gentlemen in waiting were also meant to guard their masters, a func-
tion partly pragmatic, but largely symbolic as well.36 The 1595 household
orders of Anthony Maria Browne, second Viscount Montagu, dwell on
the importance of the wearing of “handsome swords or rapiers” by
gentlemen and yeomen waiters who accompany him abroad.37 The
viscount might have anticipated an attack by Protestant neighbors
unfriendly to his Catholicism; but his emphasis on the handsomeness of
the weapons indicates that sword wearing was also a symbol of gentility,
like an attractive and well-groomed appearance, courteous behavior,
and mannerly speech. Similarly, in his 1610 orders, Henry, Prince of
Wales, is intensely conscious of how his servants’ battle-ready bearing
reflects on his own masculine worth: “I hold it fitting,” he remarks, “for
the court of a manly young prince to have such a select guard of able
bodies as may match any other men for their number in all manly exer-
cises whatsoever.” He seeks “well shap’t and comely personages” capable
of more than “only to wayte with a holberd in my great chamber.”38
A servant holding a halberd, an axe-like weapon mounted on a long
spear, would necessarily be standing at attention rather than engaging
in “manly exercises.” Implicitly, Henry’s men should have the martial
accomplishments of a feudal retinue along with the ornamental qualities
of men of breeding and leisure. Nevertheless, exhibitions of strength or
aggression were often strictly controlled; the Earl of Huntingdon’s
orders “suffer no drawing or shewing of swords or daggers in the
chamber, or withdrawing chamber; nor any wrestling or striving, or any
noyse or disorder there to be used.”39 The courteous community of serv-
ants was also a corps trained in martial virtues, displaying both power
and refinement, and performing an idealized family life based partly
on nostalgia for feudal institutions and partly on new standards of

courtesy.
The proliferating “private” spaces of early modern domestic archi-
tecture allowed aristocrats to retreat from the hall as social distinctions
came to be expressed in more and more elaborate levels of spatial divi-
sion.40 In a parallel development, household orders move from a focus
on the community of lord and servants in the hall to the amplification
of rules regarding access and attendance: seventeenth-century orders
seek to maintain a privileged area of limited access around the master
or mistress, while also drawing circles of attendants around this point
of relative privacy. The increasing concern with access in seventeenth-
century orders contrasts strongly with the suspicion of privacy evident
in Bishop Grosseteste’s thirteenth-century orders. Of his seventeen
commandments, the last three establish open, public relations in the
hall: the lord should eat there before his men “so much as ye may
without peril of sickness and wearyness”; he should speak to his bailiffs
“in open place, and not in privy”; and he should forbid servants from
dining “prively in hid place.”41 Even Henry VIII’s 1526 orders, quoted
above, reveal more concern for constant attendance than for exclusivity
when they address “privacy.” Later orders call for the gentleman usher
to lock a door and allow none to enter when “his Lord wilbe retyred
private.”42 However, even in this move towards exclusivity, ensuring
constant attendance at various distances from the lord is just as
important as restricting access to him: only privacy under observation
demonstrates the lord’s status as the focal point of the household’s
social space. As we have seen, Prince Henry’s 1610 orders seek to form
a household of men whose inner and outer graces will mirror and
magnify those of their master. Henry’s first concern is to ensure their
presence when he has withdrawn himself to “privy” rooms. He seems
to find the problem of keeping his immediate vicinity well stocked with
servants more difficult than warding off unwanted company: he asks
“That the ante-chambers of my court be better attended at due hours
in the morning, and other times, as my presence chamber and privy
chamber, which are often found without any person in them, whilest
I am retired in my more private lodgings.”43 A loyal retinue should
surround Prince Henry’s moments of retirement. Like his requirement of
battle-ready serving men, this strategy helped to protect the prince from
attackers. Nevertheless, status and safety collude here; the prince wishes
his moments of relative seclusion to be witnessed by as many as possible,
arranging “comely personages” around him at distances far enough to
mark his superiority, but close enough that he must never suffer isolation.
As Prince Henry observes, to be attended by “but lackeys or pages …

is neither safe nor fitt for the state of a prince” (254).
Perhaps the most telling aspect of feudal nostalgia in seventeenth-
century household orders is what they leave unregulated: women
servants. Kate Mertes and Lawrence Stone have argued that seventeenth-
century aristocratic households were shrinking in size and importance
in the social fabric of the English countryside. According to Mertes,
after 1600 great households decayed “from social institutions to purely
domestic establishments.”44 Ordinary domestic work, unlike the work
of servingmen and officers in great households, was generally gendered
feminine; in fact, most servants were women by the seventeenth century,
and the proportion of women servants continued to increase over the
next two centuries in what historians have called the “feminization
of service.” Wendy Wall notes that early modern constructions of
household work focus on huswifery, the science of the domestic that
aristocratic ladies as well as commoners practiced.45 In the aristocratic
households regulated by my texts, women servants would have staffed
at least the laundry and dairy; by the eighteenth century even large
household staffs were dominated by women.46 Yet the feminization of
service is nowhere reflected in seventeenth-century household orders.
Here, service appears as an almost wholly male preserve, and just as
Robert Grosseteste warned lords to “let no wife” join the male community
in the hall, Renaissance orders conserve the male community on paper,
if not in fact.
Rhetorically, the orders segregate women away from the main social
spaces of the hall, great chamber, and withdrawing rooms and treat
their service as irrelevant to the main business of the household. In
the course of 20 pages, perhaps a sentence or two will refer to women
servants. Robert Sidney, second Earl of Leicester’s orders of 1625–26
require “That all men shall forebeare comyng into the Nursery Landry or
other places where the woemen servants are particulerly to be ymployed
without other company than themselves onely.”47 The lady of the
household is assumed to rule within these female realms, which are
therefore beyond the reach of household orders. The attitude of “R.B.”
towards these spaces is typical: he notes that “For that the Countesse
is to appointe such an ancient gentlewoman, or other as pleaseth her,
to have oversight both of Lawnedry and Nurcery, I will not set downe
any directions for these places, wholy referring them to her honor’s
pleasure.”48 This attachment to a feudal vision of the ideal household
suggests nostalgia for a time when large retinues of male servants were
more than merely symbolic markers of prestige.
Household Orders and Family Portraits:

Performing Privacy and Gender
For newly created lords or families threatened with a loss of prestige,

the commissioning of household orders and portraits was a strategy
representing the aristocratic family as thriving, powerful, and well
governed. Like early modern portraits, household orders often marked
their subject’s ascension to a new status while linking him to past patri-
archs. Morgan Coleman began working on his elaborate manuscript
for Lionel Cranfield six months after the social-climbing merchant
was created Baron Cranfield. Similarly, after the death of the first Duke
of Buckingham, Charles I and the dowager Duchess of Buckingham
commissioned works of art and a set of household orders that affirmed
the continuation of the family’s power. In the year that Katherine
Villiers was contemplating remarriage, she took steps to affirm her
status as Duchess of Buckingham (a title she retained). With Charles
I’s permission, she erected a tomb featuring effigies of herself and the
first duke in the Henry VII chapel of Westminster Abbey, despite the
Tudor king’s stipulation restricting this space to his royal descendants.49
Five months later, in April 1635, the Duchess braved general criticism
by marrying Randal MacDonnell, Lord Dunluce (1609–83), an Irish
Catholic and a younger man. The same year, Charles I commissioned
Anthony Van Dyck to paint a group portrait of Buckingham’s sons. The
Van Dyck portrait depicts a baby-faced but gorgeously attired 7-year-old
duke gazing solemnly at the viewer, while his younger brother, beside
and slightly behind him, looks towards the little duke (Figure 3.1). Like
this portrait, the 1634 Buckingham household orders present the young
duke (in words written by Morgan Coleman for Lionel Cranfield and
signed by the Duchess of Buckingham) as the moral center of a family of
loyal and deferential men who “living in a peaceable Conversation god
may ever be glorified my selfe well served and pleased, and all conten-
tions Disorders and emulation banished from amongst my Servants.”50
The tomb effigies, the household orders, and the boys’ portrait repre-
sent the second duke as the titular head of a powerful dynasty, despite
the duchess’s politically embarrassing conversion and remarriage and
her sons’ removal from her guardianship.
The Browne family deployed a similar strategy in the 1590s that
deserves exploration here. The 1595 household ordinances of Anthony
Maria Browne, second Viscount Montagu, 50 quarto pages in length,
offer a view of privacy and male household communities that is
enriched and complicated by the 1598 cabinet miniature by Isaac Oliver,
Figure 3.1 Anthony van Dyck, George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, and Lord
Francis Villiers, 1635. Supplied and reproduced by kind permission of Royal
Collection Trust. © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2012.
The Browne Brothers (Figure 3.2). Anthony Browne was just 18 years
old when, in 1592, both his father and grandfather died. Now the
young man was head of the family and inheritor of the name, title, and
property of his grandfather, Anthony Browne, first Viscount Montagu
(1528–92), a man renowned for firm Catholicism as well as faithful
service to Tudor monarchs. The first viscount participated in the trial of
Figure 3.2 Isaac Oliver, The Browne Brothers, 1598. Reproduced by kind permission
of the Burghley House Collection, Lincolnshire.
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, in 1586; led a troop of horsemen against

the Spanish Armada in 1588; and threw a grand entertainment for Queen
Elizabeth at Cowdray House in 1591.51 For the new Lord Montagu,
then, family headship meant not only responsibilities to his household,
kin, and locality, but the duty of representing the Catholic aristocracy as
a loyal minority under Protestant rule. With a difficult path before him
in public life, Browne sought to establish his new authority at home by
defining his role as family head. Montagu’s religious non-conformity
demanded a vision of the household that fit conventional forms of
private virtue while recognizing his family’s difference from the aristo-
cratic norm.
Isaac Oliver’s portrait is an example of a cabinet miniature, full-length
portraits of up to 11 inches on a side, first painted by Nicholas Hilliard
in the late 1580s.52 Such portraits use the same techniques and materials
as the smaller head-and-shoulders miniatures, but place their sitters

in richly detailed settings weighted with symbolic meaning.53 Like the
smaller format, the cabinet miniature usually represents a single person
and often employs emblems and mottos to convey an allegorical message
about the sitter’s character and affective ties: his romantic passion, his
courage and fidelity to the queen, or his melancholic retreat from society.
Understanding these portraits required insider knowledge of the signifi-
cance of such signs and symbols to the sitter’s personal history. Thus
miniatures are in a sense private objects, designed to be kept in small
spaces and viewed at close range. While smaller miniatures were often
set in jeweled frames or hung on pendants to be worn by their owner,
cabinet miniatures might be hidden behind curtains, so that the viewer
seemed to be exposing a secret treasure. As with other cabinet minia-
tures, this portrait presents its subject as a private person; but in this
case, the privacy presented is the male sociality of the household.
Despite this aura of privacy, The Browne Brothers suggests that a wider
audience was envisioned for these intimate objects. The miniature
is unusual in that it presents a group. Like other portrait miniatures,
it seeks to convey its sitters’ affect symbolically, but its subject is intimacy
among men in the household. Rather than highlighting the sitter’s
nobility by isolating him in a luxurious setting, the portrait depicts
four men, three of whom are dressed identically, standing in a paneled
room that is otherwise bare of ornament. Here, conformity prevails over
status difference, an ordering that is at odds with the isolated figures,
opulent surroundings, and elaborate garb of Oliver’s other portrait minia-
tures, such as Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (1596) and Richard Sackville,
3rd Earl of Dorset (1616). The identically dressed men are Montagu and
his younger brothers, John and William, who stand in a tight group
under the words “Figurae Conformis Affectus” (“The figure conforms to
the heart”).54 The motto informs viewers that the brothers’ inner selves
correspond to their clothing and postures, implying that an inward
might, invisible but reflected in their outward sameness, lies in the
interlocked arms of the brothers. Their gestures are carefully planned:
John, on the right, holds Anthony’s arm; William, on the left, reaches
over Anthony to touch John’s shoulder; and Anthony holds William’s
waist. Standing this way, each brother is touching the other two; each
holds another and is held by another. Also, each brother relaxes one
arm and grasps a brother with the other, producing “natural” poses that
belie a complex effort to achieve perfect equality. The pose imitates the
Renaissance motif of the Three Graces, but in this case the three figures
face the viewer rather than forming a circle. Montagu’s portrait appeals
to viewers to admire his family’s internal sameness and their difference

from an opulent aristocratic norm.55 Like most seventeenth-century
household orders, the portrait presents the “private” community of the
Montagu clan as a graceful, courteous, and affectively united group.
Montagu and his brothers wear neither sword nor armor, signs of
aristocratic accomplishment and service to the monarch that are other-
wise ubiquitous in full-length portraits by Oliver. As we have seen, the
viscount commanded his gentlemen-in-waiting to wear “handsome
swords or rapiers,” but his family portrait eschews martial symbolism.
Presumably, the portrait rejects warlike symbols of nostalgia for medieval
households because they would have suggested a threat to the
Elizabethan regime. The absence of swords may indicate the anticipa-
tion of unsympathetic public scrutiny, and, as we will see, such an
expectation would have been well warranted.
Two other puzzles complicate the interpretation of Oliver’s portrait.
The first is the role of the fourth figure. His identity has been ambigu-
ous since George Vertue noted around 1730 that in this “curious large
limning” “a relation, or servant is coming in.”56 Modern scholars have
been less willing to relegate the fourth man to a dependent role. Roy
Strong categorically denies that the figure can be a servant, because “his
age is given and he is dressed as a gentleman,” and his figure is “clearly
a portrait.”57 The fourth man is not subordinated by blurred features
or shadows, or relegated to the background; the light shines fully on
his face, which has delicate features and an expression of serenity, like
the others.58 The evidence that I have drawn from household orders,
however, indicates that the fourth man’s prominence and his elegant
stance, clothing, and features reflect the importance of gentleman servants
in aristocratic households. They reflected honor on their masters, but
also provided an audience for their private lives; this man accentuates
the brothers’ intimacy by his deferential presence. A well-bred witness
to the Brownes’ splendor of affect, he makes the portrait’s subject not
merely similitude or like-mindedness, but the practice of a refined
and decorous non-conformity – more, the performance of a gracefully
dissenting virtue before an audience. The portrait depicts the home as a
place where familiarity is demonstrated before admiring witnesses.
The fourth man’s gown or cloak suggests the garb that Lord Montagu
required of his most important officers. Lord Montagu’s household ordi-
nances state that his steward must wear a gown to dine, “for honor, and
order’s sake,” and that his comptroller must always wear one, “for so the
gravity of his place, and person will require.”59 Montagu’s secretary has
another badge of office, a “comely black cloak” that must be worn at all times
in the house. The servant is instrumental in this portrait of brotherhood:

his striking appearance compensates for the lack of lush carpets and
drapery, and he displays the viscount’s patriarchal role. Moreover, the
portrait underlines the sitters’ youthful grace by giving the age of each
man in gold on the wall to his left: the brothers are 21, 24, and 18 years
old, and the servant 21. The individual identity of the servant is as
important to the portrait as his subordination; both distance and inti-
macy are necessary to fulfill his functions of observer and testimony to
Montagu’s virtuous household. The servant’s pose indicates his double
role: his body is turned towards the brothers and his face towards the
viewer, as though he has just turned his head from them to us, sharing
with us the perspective of an audience to the brothers’ nobility.
The second puzzle in Oliver’s portrait comes from his probable
inspiration by a widely distributed engraving celebrating French Pro-
testant heroism (Figure 3.3). Gaspard II de Coligny, admiral of France
(1519–72), was a Huguenot leader whose murder on the eve of the
St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre became a potent symbol of religious
martyrdom. The Coligny portrait, by engraver Marc Duval (1545–81),
signifies communal loyalty and singleness of purpose; like the Browne
brothers, the Colignys were united by adherence to an embattled
religious cause. Scholars trace Duval’s work to an anonymous painting
that has slight differences: in it, one brother (Odet) wears ecclesiastical
garb, and all three have hats, but do not carry swords. The engraving’s
alterations concentrate its message on militarized religious unity; it
gives the three brothers almost identical martial wear and swords.60
In some examples, German text accompanies the portrait, and it also
may have been distributed in England; perhaps the Huguenot brothers
symbolized a hoped-for international alliance. The engraving could
have reached Isaac Oliver in any number of ways, for he was probably
of Huguenot descent and traveled extensively in Europe in the 1590s.61
Like The Browne Brothers, the Coligny engraving presents solidarity under
persecution as an attribute of noble refinement. Like the Brownes’ por-
trait, it constructs a masculine ideal out of complex signs of intimacy
and distance, luxury and plainness, social conformity and minority
status. The importance of grace in the Coligny portrait – in posture, in
clothing, and in the gestures of courtly civility – shows that oppositional
aristocratic stances were constructed partly by reference to conventional
signs of social conformity.
Comparing the Coligny portrait to the Brownes’ produces further
insight into Isaac Oliver and Lord Montagu’s purposes. The Browne
portrait’s differences from the Coligny portrait suggest that the fourth
Figure 3.3 Marc Duval, Les trois frères Coligny, 1579, Rothschild Collection,
Louvre Museum, Paris. © RMN (Musée du Louvre) – © Thierry Ollivier.
man, the servant, is essential to crafting a coherent vision of noble

heroism. His presence marks the most significant difference between
the portraits. The setting also changes, from a bare strip of land suggestive
of a battleground to a painted and paneled interior.62 In the Coligny

portrait, the martyr Gaspard wears a hat while his brothers are uncovered;
in the Browne portrait, hat protocol differentiates the servant, rather
than the military leader. The changes give Oliver’s domestic setting
symbolic weight: Lord Montagu will assume the heritage of noble leader-
ship within and through his household. Montagu and Oliver place
Catholic leadership within the household, where Montagu defends
the faith through solidarity with the brothers and governance of the
servants.
Although Oliver’s portrait idealizes the Browne family’s domestic
solidarity by aestheticizing brotherly love and faithful service, that very
solidarity was a source of great suspicion for the Protestant majority
and the Elizabethan state. Michael Questier’s research tracks the Browne
family’s increasingly suspect position in the eyes of court authorities
through the course of the 1590s. The State Papers of the mid-1580s
include a list of the first Viscount Montagu’s servants, marked down
as Catholic.63 In 1592, the first Viscount Montagu defended his role as a
Catholic householder by declaring, “I seeke to drawe no man to that reli-
geon, neather chylde nor servant, but let them doo theyr conscyences
therein as God shall putt in theyre myndes” (qtd. in Questier, 193).
He went on to assert that six of his chief and most trusted servants were
Protestant, and that he neither required servants to attend church nor
prohibited them from it. Despite his protestations, the Privy Council
clearly considered the Montagu household a harbor for conspiracy,
and in 1593 ordered the arrest of “divers dangerous persons” “residing
in the howse or howses of the old Lady Montagu,” now the first
viscount’s widow. Lady Montagu’s biographer, Richard Smith, describes
her persecution by both legal authorities and ordinary local Protestants,
one of whom supposedly “took to standing outside the gatehouse at
Battle and screaming abuse at her” (qtd. in Questier, 229). On May 22,
1594, Archbishop Whitgift and Lord Keeper Puckering interrogated the
second viscount about the christening of his daughter, which Montagu
had himself performed in private rather than submitting to the Church
of England’s rite. His conscience had been troubled, he confessed,
because his first child, a son, had died on the day appointed for his
christening. The extent to which the second viscount supported Catholic
political goals is unknown; Questier speculates that this event may
have been a turning point for Montagu, a crisis of conscience that led
to increasing non-conformity and attempts privately to support and pub-
licly to defend fellow Catholics. In 1602, a Catholic informant claimed
that Montagu was the linchpin of a national conspiracy, an accusation
implying that, regardless of his actual participation, he was readily

cast in such a role by both Catholics and Protestants.64 On June 24,
1604, Montagu delivered a long, impassioned speech before the House
of Lords in protest at an anti-recusant bill. His speech was taken as an
attack on the Church of England and earned him imprisonment and a
forced apology.
Montagu’s portrait miniature and household orders highlight his
role as a guarantor of piety, virtue, and stability, stressing the unity of
servants and master as an anchor of social order. The orders’ preface
compares his household to a nation: “neither publique weale, or private
family can continewe, or long endure without lawes, ordinances, and
statutes to guyde and directe ytt: nor without prudente, and experi-
enced ministers to execute the same.”65 Prudently executed, the orders
will establish a harmonious community. However, Montagu does not
press the analogy between the state and the household too far. Cultural
critics have often observed that the early modern analogy between the
patriarchal family and the monarchy confounds our modern distinction
between private and public spheres by making the home a mirror of,
and support for, the state; nevertheless, this analogy can also danger-
ously imply that the household presents an alternative to the state’s
power and a competing source of social and religious indoctrination.
Montagu’s household orders show him at pains to demonstrate that his
household befits his station, but does not exceed it. His “Conclusion”
argues that “the civill governemente of myne howseholde” is
best fittinge the degree of that place, and callinge, wherein by her
Majesty’s favor I nowe lyve, meaninge thereby neither in presump-
tion to hazarde the displeasure of the state, nor in any sorte to
encroache uppon the rightes of my superiours, neither yett inten-
deinge to yelde to any degree just cause of conceyte, that this my
course hath proceeded, either of vayne glorye, or any other light, and
ydle fancye, but only of a carefull regarde moved to see my people
lyve under me in such civillitye, and seemelye behaviour, as maye
stande most with myne honor, and the dutifull discharge of their
service. (133–4)
Such comments suggest that Montagu saw the fashioning of household

relations as a mode of studied self-presentation – to those outside as
well as inside his household. This “private family,” then, was hardly
“private” in our sense – it was open to scrutiny and judgment from
inside and out.
Although he compares the household to a commonwealth, Montagu

avoids presenting himself as a domestic monarch, instead offering an
implicitly contractual model for his household rule. The rule-governed
hierarchy that his orders establish will benefit all parties:
I dare boldely affirme, that [the orders] are both honorable, and
profitable to myself: and verye easye to all my servanttes. … The first
whereof I have affected for myne owne behoof, and contentment: the
other for the behoof of my servanttes, uppon whom I woulde nott
willingly ympose that service, which they shall nott be able, even
with greate facilitye, and quiett to themselves, to performe. (120)
Whereas medieval orders relied on an implicit ethics of obedience

towards one’s superiors, reinforced by the lord’s presence among his men,
Montagu’s orders offer a rational justification of the system, promise
to enhance servants’ job satisfaction, and urge them to take pleasure
in the orderliness of the household. Unlike medieval orders, Montagu’s
implicitly ask for his servants’ consent rather than assuming the
intrinsic value of obedience to one’s superiors. This contractual model
represents the household as a consensual society generating honor and
contentment for all concerned, rather than as an instrument of Montagu’s
personal will and authority – and thus, to wary Protestants, a breeding
ground for Catholic dissent. Still, the contractual model also allows
Montagu to maintain that his household is a powerful institution estab-
lishing social stability and personal virtue.
Montagu’s rhetorical defense of his household was belied in 1605 by
the exposure of the Gunpowder Plot, for Guy Fawkes had served in his
household in 1592 and 1593. Another conspirator, Robert Catesby, was a
relative by marriage who had warned Montagu not to attend Parliament
that session.66 Montagu was released from the Tower with only a fine, but
his political marginalization was ensured. Despite all this, he seems to
have succeeded in separating his identity as a virtuous householder and
patriarch from the suspicion attached to his religion. The local Anglican
clergyman Edward Topsell dedicates his The Householder, or Perfect Man
(1609) to Montagu and other Sussex noblemen, while carefully balanc-
ing approbation for Montagu’s “private wisdom” with contempt for
his religion.67 In Topsell’s words, Montagu’s “charity aboundeth above
many: and I think (if fame be no Liar) above most of your rank.” But
hope is expressed “that as one of your eyes is opened, and seeth the
object of your mercy, and the true use of your large Patrimony, so in
time, [God] will open the other, to see the infallible object of a Christian
faith, for the possession of your far greater Patrimony in heaven” (A1r).
Topsell’s praise for Montagu’s use of his earthly patrimony grants him
the role of private leader delineated in his portrait and household orders,
while diplomatically ignoring the threat that such leadership posed in
the public eye.
“The Matter of Woemens Greatnesse”:

Women’s Household Orders
Let us return to the women who are conspicuously absent from the
household orders and group portraits of the second Duke of Buckingham
and the second Viscount Montagu. The Duchess of Buckingham’s
initials on the orders assigned to the young duke indicate the near-
invisibility of both female mastery and service in household orders; her
vision of a great household requires a patriarch to head it, even if he is
only 6 years old. Almost all English household orders in which the
head of household is named as a woman are those of queens; neverthe-
less, one intriguing counterexample, the orders of Lady Jane Berkeley
(c. 1547–1618), survives. Comparing Lady Berkeley’s and Queen Henrietta
Maria’s orders demonstrates the tensions inherent in female household
mastery. Women’s orders display the same concerns about negotiating
proximity and access that we have seen in men’s household orders,
but they also reveal gendered problems in establishing authority and
defining privacy. All three of these documents reveal the performative
function of household orders in presenting an image of private harmony;
in the case of women’s orders, the unity of husband and wife becomes
the crucial subject of representation.
Lady Jane Berkeley was a woman deeply concerned with her role in
the future welfare of her family dynasty. She was born into a family
with highly placed political connections: her father, Sir Michael
Stanhope (c. 1508–52), was the brother-in-law of Protector Somerset and
was tried with his kinsman and executed for insurrection in 1552. The
family’s fortunes revived with her brothers, Sir Thomas Stanhope and
Sir Michael Stanhope, who rose to wealth and influence as clients of
William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Lady Berkeley’s marriages also increased
the family’s wealth and status: she became the second wife of Sir Roger
Townshend of Raynham (1544–90), a courtier and client of the Howard
family, with whom she had two sons; after his death, his connections
probably led to her impressive second marriage in 1598 to Henry,
seventh Baron Berkeley, whose first wife had been a Howard. Lord
Berkeley was constantly in need of funds and quickly proved unable or
unwilling to fulfill the terms of their marriage contract. Lady Berkeley’s

brother Sir Michael Stanhope as well as Sir Thomas Howard, later Earl of
Suffolk (1561–1626), exerted pressure on her behalf, with the result that
in 1600 Lord Berkeley paid her jointure in cash in exchange for release
from his obligations, a series of financial transactions that Lawrence
Stone judged to be “brutal” and “onerous” to Lord Berkeley.68 Certainly,
Lady Berkeley was left in a more secure financial position than her
husband; this may account for their strained marriage. Lord Berkeley’s
steward, John Smyth of Nibley (1567–1641), declared in his manu-
script history of the Berkeley family lineage that “as they never bedded
togeather that any of their attendants could observe, whereby they
might have become one flesh; so were themselves and their families for
most part as farre asunder as Barbican in London, and Callowdon by
Coventry: neither medled hee more with her lands or goods, or ought
else that was hers, then with her.”69 Their estrangement does not seem
to have been complete, for elsewhere Smyth locates the couple together
at Callowden Hall, and he includes brief household orders “by both lord
and lady approved of” for Callowden. However, Smyth also preserved
Lady Berkeley’s own household orders, dated August 1601. The oddity of
a woman issuing her own household orders seems to have struck Smyth
as a sign of pride and studied magnificence: he appends Lady Berkeley’s
orders at the end of the manuscript rather than including them with
the joint orders, and justifies this exclusion by declaring himself “little
desiring to meddle in the matter of woemens greatnes” (365–6).
“Greatness” is a key term for John Smyth of Nibley, one that he uses
throughout The Lives of the Berkeleys to denominate a sense of entitlement
commendable in some cases, but in others immoderate and financially
destructive. Had Lady Berkeley taken more interest in the Berkeley
family greatness, Smyth would probably have found her “greatness”
praiseworthy; but instead, she directed her efforts towards her sons’
families, particularly by raising her grandson, Roger Townshend, whose
father died in a duel in 1603, when the boy was 7 years old.70 She
bought his wardship and raised him in her houses, which included
the Barbican house and Ashley House in Surrey, built by her in 1602–07.
In November 1613 she was building a new house at Kensington for her
grandson; in 1617, she paid for his baronetcy; and he was her main
heir when she died in 1618.71 James Rosenheim notes that Lady Jane
“left her mark indelibly [on the Townshend family], partly because she
expended some £24,000 on the family’s behalf, but also because she was
a shrewd and determined woman devoted to her family’s welfare.”72
She left several copies of a manuscript detailing her gifts to her family,
suggesting, as Rosenheim remarks, that she wished to be remembered

as a benefactor.
Lady Berkeley is now best known to historians for building the innova-
tive Ashley House in Surrey, an early example of the use of an axial hall.
Reorienting the traditional position of the ground-floor hall allowed
her to create more rooms and circulation routes on the next floor,
where the great chamber was located.73 Such choices were identi-
fied by W. G. Hoskins as indicators of an increased desire for privacy
that would become the norm through the course of the seventeenth
century, as householders “retreated” from the great hall to more “private”
spaces. However, Lady Berkeley’s household orders demonstrate that
her interest in privacy was not focused on retreating from scrutiny, but
on creating increasingly fine distinctions in social spaces. She urges
her gentlemen servants to remain with her and her lord in the great
(or dining) chamber after daily services rather than return to the hall
with the yeomen servants, “for as the hall is a fit place for the yomen so is
the dining room most convenient for the gentlemen to make their most
abode in.”74 The privacy that Lady Berkeley seeks involves inclusions as
much as exclusions. She uses the dining chamber not to wall herself
away from the servants, but to distinguish among status levels: she
welcomes gentlemen servants to “come into the dining room at any
time when my lord and I am at play there at any kind of game” (419).
Like other seventeenth-century orders, Lady Berkeley’s arrange her
gentlemen attendants in an attractive display surrounding her and
her lord at carefully managed distances. She attempts to lend her pres-
ence exclusivity by limiting servants’ access; but at the same time, she
attempts to ensure that she is always well accompanied. The somewhat
contradictory nature of performative privacy leads her into long-winded
explanations, as here:
Further when I shall walk any way out of the park as into the
fields … then would I have the gentlemen usher and the rest of my
gentlemen to be in readiness to wait upon me. Further when I do
walk in the park then I do license the gentlemen either to walke,
bowl, shoot, or use any other pastime where I walk in this order. If
I do walk in the high walk then they may be in the lower walk; if I do
walk in the lower walk then they may be in the upper walk. (419)
Such complex explanations may arise from the tensions inherent in

female mastery of male servants. While seeking near-constant attend-
ance, as a lord would, Lady Berkeley also discourages the appearance
of intimacy with male servants. Plays like Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

reveal how the possibility of such class-crossing romantic liaisons could
be both comic and threatening. We see a similar tension in negotiating
relations with male servants in Elizabeth, Lady Compton’s 1610 letter
to her new husband William, in which she stipulates her expectations
for servants’ attendance. She demands six or eight gentlemen and
two gentlewomen, for “it is an undecent thing for a gentlewoman to
stand mumping alone.” On the other hand, her gentleman usher must
have his own horse, for “it is undecent to crowd up myself with my
gentleman-usher in my coach.” Like Lady Berkeley, Lady Compton
strives to preserve gradations of status among the servants; even their
clothing should occupy separate spaces, “not posturing my things
with my women’s, nor theirs with chambermaids, nor theirs with
wash-maids.”75
Lady Berkeley is especially concerned to display her gentlemen
servants to advantage in the presence of guests, when they “shall keep
most in the dining chamber to make show of themselves both for the
honor of my lord and me and to be ready to do such service as shall
be commanded them.” Upon arrival of a guest, “though but one in
number,” she requires the gentlemen servants to wear livery coats “for
the first night and all the next day following”; if guests arrive on a
Sunday or holiday, they should wear their cloaks the first day and livery
coats the next. Likewise, livery coats are required “at any time when
my lord or I ride abroad,” and either livery coats or cloaks whenever
they are in the dining chamber or “sit at play with my lord and me”
(419). As is typical of seventeenth-century orders, she does not call for
ceremonious gestures, but asks for civility from her servants and the
avoidance of gambling, “disorderly pastimes,” and “great noise” (420).
Instead, she suggests that they indulge in more decorous games that
create a delightful spectacle, “as bowling, and chiefly exercise of your
long bow wherein I take great delight” (420).
While Viscount Montagu explicitly addresses his own right to create
rules for his servants, the question of Lady Berkeley’s authority enters her
text more subtly. The orders begin decisively with the title “Orders set
down by my lady to be observed by the gentlemen in every respect …”
and often refer to her own desires with phrases such as “my pleasure
is ….” As she concludes, however, the true authorship of the orders
becomes muddled. Lady Berkeley defends the orders as a means to
teach good manners to those servants “of meaner calling”; here she
refers to “reasonable orders set down by my lord and mee,” although
a few paragraphs later she reasserts herself: “you shall well know all
these orders are set down by myself” (421). Lady Berkeley’s orders
thus perform her mastery of her private realm by asserting that she, as
much as her semi-estranged husband, is its ruler; but they also reveal
the tendentiousness of that claim and anticipate resistance from those,
like her steward John Smyth, who would consider this text a “matter of
woemens greatnes.”
Queen Henrietta Maria’s household orders of 1627 and 1631 reflect
the political divisions of the moment, particularly those between King
Charles and the queen’s brother, Louis XIII, between Henrietta Maria’s
French entourage and the English court, and between Protestants and
(English and French) Catholics. In this case, the performance of privacy
had important repercussions for both domestic and international state-
craft. The marriage treaty contained detailed stipulations about the
queen’s household, which would consist of French Catholics chosen
by Louis XIII; moreover, the queen would be attended by 28 clerics,
including a bishop, and would have a suitably furnished chapel in every
royal palace. The treaty promised Henrietta Maria remarkable freedom
to practice her religion and even to bring up her children as Catholics,
while secret articles promised an end to the prosecution of English
Catholics.76
However, from the first meeting of the king and queen at Dover, the
privilege of attendance on and proximity to the queen became the sub-
ject of dissension among the queen, the king, his favorite Buckingham,
and the French court, which read reports of Henrietta Maria’s reception
with a critical eye. When Charles romantically invited Henrietta Maria
to share his carriage to Canterbury, her chief lady-in-waiting, Madame
de Saint-Georges, was excluded in favor of Buckingham’s wife and
mother and the Countess of Arundel. In turn, the Buckingham ladies
were excluded from Henrietta Maria’s household; the English gentry
and nobility remained envious witnesses to the new royal household,
debarred from its many opportunities for advancement. Observer
Katherine Gorges wrote that the queen reserved favor for French and
Catholics only, “soe all the English Ladies are gon from hir Court,
except the Cowntes of Arrundell.” After attending a “Masque acted by
the Queens seruants all french” in November 1625, Gorges expressed
disgust at the ugliness and advanced age of the French ladies attending
the queen.77 In short order, the composition of the queen’s household
and its members’ behavior became the subject of comment and resent-
ment. Henrietta Maria was relatively isolated within a transplanted
French court, and quarreled openly with both Charles and Buckingham
over the terms of the marriage treaty.78
Charles I inherited the throne just two months before his marriage,
and contemplated the arrangement of his own royal household at about
the same time that he plunged into disagreements over his bride’s. He
had definite ideas about the social space of the royal chambers, ideas
that differed sharply from his father’s. One month after James’s death,
the Tuscan ambassador, Amerigo Salvetti, reported:
His Majesty has found time to attend to the organization of his

Court and Household, showing himself in all things so strict that
already a great change is observable. Dignity, respectful demeanour,
and regularity, are insisted upon; from which every one may readily
conjecture how much weight His Majesty will attach to deference
and obedience in matters of serious importance. The King has made
it known that whoever may have business with him must never
approach him by indirect ways, by back stairs or private doors lead-
ing to his apartments … as was done in the lifetime of his father …
His Majesty will not permit Nobles or Members of the Privy Council
to enter the gallery or private apartments without being summoned,
as they have been in the habit of doing during the last reign. Every
one is to take his place in the ante-chambers according to his rank,
as was the usage in the time of Queen Elizabeth.79
Charles’s evident concern with performing privacy by arranging spaces

and persons according to status and regulating proximity to his person
reflects the political dimensions of privacy at the royal court. Salvetti
perceives Charles’s organizational efforts as a sign of his desire for “def-
erence and obedience” in “matters of serious importance”; however,
as it turned out, household matters became just such serious matters.
Charles was rumored to have erupted over the complaints of Henrietta
Maria’s priests about the space set aside for her chapel, remarking that
“if the queen’s closet, where they now say mass, were not large enough,
let them have it in the great chamber, and if the great chamber were
not wide enough, they might use the garden; and if the garden would
not serve their turn, then was the park the fittest place.”80 Finally,
in November 1625, Charles demanded that Henrietta Maria reform her
court in order to imitate the orderly and dignified access to the presence
that he recalled from his mother’s court. The queen objected strongly in
public, outraging the king; in return, he resolved to dismiss her entire
household, including clergy, and at length did so in June 1626, directing
Buckingham to drive “them away lyke so manie wyld beastes, until ye
have shipped them; and so the Devill go with them!”81 Charles blamed
Henrietta Maria’s resistance to his authority on the “Monsieurs,” her

French priests and attendants; having established his power over her
entourage, he became more amenable to acceding to her requests.
Charles’ purging of the Queen’s household was a turning point in their
marriage; they soon compromised on a household combining French
and English attendants, who performed together in a masque for the first
time in November 1626.82 In October 1626, Salvetti reported Henrietta
Maria to be “happy and cheerful” living at Denmark House: “the Queen
is much better served … and all the offices of her Court are being
filled up.”83 The religious and diplomatic causes of the royal couple’s
marital differences continued: disputes with France led to war in June
1627 and the celebration of masses at court infuriated Parliament.
Nevertheless, Charles and Henrietta Maria presented a united front
from then on, one that was further solidified on Buckingham’s assas-
sination. Henrietta Maria, as the Venetian ambassador Alvise Contarini
noted, now “concentrates in herself the favour and love that were previ-
ously divided between her and the duke.”84 The importance of control
over household organization in the couple’s rapprochement appears in
English negotiations for peace with France. Although Henrietta Maria
declared herself “perfectly satisfied” with her court and well treated in
matters of religion, the French sought repeatedly to reinstate Louis XIII’s
control over staffing of the queen’s household, reportedly inciting
Charles to assert that “for the future he means to be master here.”85
Contarini’s efforts to negotiate a peace ran aground on the household
issue, for, as he wrote, “the king is so determined about this that he would
let all the rest go to ruin first … they should not insist on the point of the
queen’s household, because it will certainly protract the negotiations and
perhaps break it [sic] off.”86 In the end, the nations celebrated a cessation
of arms on May 10, 1629 without a formal peace agreement. Both domes-
tic and international peace were established informally, by an implicit
recognition of Charles I’s de facto power over his wife’s household.
The queen’s household orders of 1627 and 1631 reveal Charles’s desire to
establish authority over her entourage. The orders also document their
eventual marital equilibrium, which allowed Charles to maintain his
patriarchal role while granting concessions to Henrietta Maria out of
loving courtesy. Although the orders are “signed by their Majesties,” the
king’s voice resounds authoritatively throughout. The preface begins
by stressing both the affection that has moved Charles to establish the
orders and his primary concern with performative privacy:
Forasmuch as our tender care that our dearest Consort, the Queene
may bee attended and served to her honour and contentment,
especially that those chambers which bee appointed for her honour
and state may bee ordered accordingly; as alsoe when shee shall
please to retire into her privy lodgings, no person may have access
thither, but such onely as shee shall please to admitt or call …87
Charles continues to assert his prerogatives throughout the orders and

refers frequently to how things were done “in the time of the Queene,
our deare mother of blessed memory” (341). The late Queen Anne’s
household represents British tradition itself; the briefer orders of 1631
claim to be “conformeable to the auncient ordinances of our house”
(347). The king allots some decisions to the queen and others to him-
self, remarking that the gentlemen ushers should not “give lodgings to
any but such as shall be allowed lodgings by ourselfe” – presumably, to
avoid reinstating the large and uncontrollable entourage with which
the queen began her marriage (342).
Thus we see the king acting out his intention to “be master here” by
establishing his authority and organizing the court into performances
of privacy. Each set of orders strictly regulates the persons allowed into
each of the chambers of the queen’s court, starting with the Guard
Chamber and progressing into increasingly private realms, ending with
the Bedchamber. Charles seeks to populate each room with persons of
the correct status, while also ensuring that the queen will never be left
in too much isolation. He orders constant attendance in the Presence
Chamber, since “it is dishonourable that the Presence Chamber, where
the state and honour of the Queene ought to be kept, be left empty,”
but warns against approaching the queen “unreverently” by “passing
too near her person or approaching the state” (340–41). The centrality
of performative privacy, the queasiness over female household author-
ity, and the evocation of supposedly ancient traditions in the queen’s
household orders mirror those orders that we have seen previously.
Transferred to a royal context, these household issues of privacy, gender,
and authority became crucial to international diplomacy and stability at
court in the first years of Charles’s reign.
4
Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends
Well: Mastery and Publicity
Although women writers offer important test cases for women’s nego-
tiation of the public/private boundary, becoming the subject of public
commentary rather than its author was a more common, and equally
fraught, form of public exposure for early modern women. By delving
into a set of ballads and a Shakespeare play that represent exposure of
women’s privacy as both reward and punishment, this chapter explores
popular literature’s portrayal of women’s notoriety at the turn of the
seventeenth century. It is conventional in the period’s literature for
female characters to shudder at the thought of becoming the subject of
popular attention. Shakespeare has his Cleopatra envision with horror
witnessing “Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I’ th’ posture
of a whore” (5.2.220–21). Helena of All’s Well That Ends Well names
her horror of being “traduc’d by odious ballads” (2.1.172). To become
a notorious woman is the focus of both anxiety and ambition for the
fallen women of ballad literature, a class of heroines easily recogniz-
able in early modern literature but little noticed in modern criticism.
Heroines including Jane Shore, Rosamond, Helen of Troy, and Cressida
were icons representing an interlocking set of themes: notoriety as
both a curse and a reward for fallen women, the sexual connotation
of notoriety itself, and the complex dynamics of sympathy, identifica-
tion, and revulsion linking audiences and heroines. In the sixteenth
century these particular women hovered between history and myth,
making themselves available for any writer’s creative exploitation in
a way that mirrored their original “fall” into infamy at the hands of
their lovers. The trope of the fallen woman provides rich material for
exploring the public/private boundary because such narratives so fre-
quently take a self-reflexive turn, as when Shakespeare puts Cleopatra’s
horror of a “squeaking boy” into the mouth of his boy actor. The fallen
84
Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well 85
woman’s conflicted encounter with publicity apparently struck authors

as a rich resource for reflection on the boundaries of fiction and reality,
the gender dynamics of a male author speaking through a female
narrator, and the complex emotions entangling an author, his fictive
creations, and the audiences to whom they speak. Fallen-women ballads
and their intertextual traces on the stage have much to tell us about how
the costs of publicity for women were imagined in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries.
While the spectacle of the famous fallen woman provided sensational
material for many genres in the Elizabethan period, these heroines
seemed particularly suited to broadsheet ballads. In ballads, the fallen
woman usually speaks for herself as a narrator, and usually reflects
either with pride or shame on her own popularity. Printed quickly in
single sheets, sold cheaply, and often sung to the tune of a well-known
ditty, broadsheet ballads embodied the widespread dissemination of
short-lived popularity. As a ballad heroine, a famous woman would be
the subject of song and laughter in streets, taverns, and fairgrounds;
contemporary references to ballads relegate their readers to the lowest
social strata.1 Shakespeare uses ballads to represent social obloquy in
King Henry IV, Part 1 and The Rape of Lucrece; so do many other play-
wrights, like George Chapman: “I am afraid of nothing but I shall
be balladed” (Monsieur d’Olive, 1606).2 Their simple four-line stanzas,
interlocked couplets, colloquial diction, and formulaic plots marked
ballads as poems for the common person. Moreover, the early modern
ballads that narrate exposed crimes, social falls, and God’s vengeance
on secret sinners rely on audiences’ pleasure in the abjection of their
unlucky subjects. It is hardly surprising, then, that ballads represent a
kind of publicity considered degrading in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.
This chapter explores the genre of fallen-women ballads and sam-
ples its intertextual effects in an in-depth reading of Shakespeare’s
All’s Well That Ends Well. In its depiction of the precipitous social rise
of the gentlewoman-in-waiting, Helena, and the equally steep plunge
into infamy of her fellow dependent, Parolles, Shakespeare’s All’s Well
That Ends Well dramatizes the experience of entering public spaces and
becoming the object of an audience’s observation and judgment. In
this play, public exposure through rumor, print, or song inserts Helena
into a fabric of conventional plots and identifies her as a heroic, tragic,
or comic heroine, the object of an audience’s emulation, sympathy, or
laughter. Granting that All’s Well dramatizes the process of entrance
into public view through generic roles, we might still wonder why the
play connects Helena to Helen of Troy, Cressida, and ballad literature.

Susan Snyder has identified an ironic charge in Shakespeare’s identifica-
tion of Helena, despised by her husband, with Helen, an archetype of
sexual desirability.3 I argue, however, that the play presents Helen of
Troy as an example of the infamous ballad heroines with whom observers
like the Clown and Lafew link Helena. Helena’s passion for her social
superior and journey to the royal court leave her open to the imposition
of unwelcome public roles, particularly the role of the socially ambi-
tious and sexually available woman. Examining this play in the light
of ballad literature both demonstrates the advance of the fallen-woman
ballad into other generic territories and reveals the domestic household
as a context for performing privacy.4
Ballads and Sexual Honor: “The thinge that shuldbe sene”
The theme of seduction appears frequently in ballads of the late

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and provides a plot for several ballad
sub-genres, including the wooing of a virgin, pastoral courtship, advice
to avoid marriage, and the fallen woman’s lament. This last ballad cate-
gory takes its themes from the tradition of female complaint, which has
been surveyed by Götz Schmitz and John Kerrigan.5 The locus classicus
of elegiac narratives spoken by female lovers is Ovid’s Heroides, which
had, Schmitz argues, a decisive influence in late Elizabethan England,
when Samuel Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond (1592) and Thomas
Middleton’s Ghost of Lucrece (1600), among others, were published. The
female speakers of these verse complaints tell of their sexual misuse by
men; through either rape or seduction, they have lost both their honor
and their lovers or husbands. The women usually speak from beyond
the grave; they plead for sympathy and warn other women to avoid a
similarly tragic fate. These mournful speakers became favorite ballad
heroines in Elizabeth’s reign. We find in the Stationer’s Register for
1603 entries for such ballads as “A Lamentable Ballad of the Ladies Fall,
declaring how a Gentlewoman through her too much trust came to
her end, and how her Lover slew himself,” “The Spanish Lady’s Love,”
“The Bryde’s Buryall,” “The fayre Lady Constance of Cleveland and of her
Disloyall Knight,” and “The Wandering Prince of Troy” (also known as
“Queen Dido”); in 1607, “The Life and Death of Fair Rosamond, King
Henry the Second’s Concubine,” and in 1611–12, “The Lamentable
Song of the Lord Wigmoore, Governor of Warwicke Castle, and the
Fayre Maid of Dunsmoore: as a Warning to all Maids to have care how
they yeeld to the wanton Delights of young Gallants.”
The relation between the heroine of such a ballad and the audience
the ballad constructs – in Walter Ong’s phrase, the “fictionalized audi-
ence” – is complexly composed of both identification and repulsion.6
The ballad creates its audience as it specifies the status of its fallen
heroine, and either rewards or punishes her by making her the object
of sympathy or ridicule. In order to outline this process, I will use as an
example “The Hawthorn Tree,” an anonymous Elizabethan ballad that
thematizes women’s loss of sexual honor. It is not particularly typical
of ballads on fallen or falling women, most of which take the form of
an abandoned woman’s direct address to the reader or an exchange
between an ardent lover and reluctant mistress. “The Hawthorn Tree,”
however, is instructive in its construction of an imagined audience and
this audience’s relation to its heroine.7 From this ballad’s treatment of
its heroine, we can infer the kind of public role imposed on Helena in
All’s Well.
Like many “merry” ballads, this one initially obscures its true subject
in order to provide a surprising and witty conclusion.8 The narrator
describes how “a maide of my countre,” happening upon a flowering
hawthorn tree, asks the tree “how came this freshness vnto the” (1, 6).
Although the tree explains that sweet dew enables it to grow “trium-
phantly,” the maid remains unsatisfied:
Yea quoth the maid but where you growe

you stande at hande for every blowe
of every man for to be seen
I marvaile that you grow so grene. (13–16)
Why is the maid so surprised by the place in which the hawthorn tree
grows? The reason for her shock lies in the traditional May Day festivi-
ties: the hawthorn tree, already in flower the first week of May, would
be stripped of its branches to decorate houses and streets. This particular
hawthorn somehow survives its symbolic decapitation and remains “so
grene” despite growing in such a public spot, “at hande for every blowe /
of every man for to be seen.” The tree’s assurances that its generative
powers overcome its yearly destruction fail to put the maid at ease, and
she continues:
But howe and they chaunce to cut the downe

and carry thie braunches into the towne
then will they never nomore be sene
to growe againe so freshe & grene. (21–4)
The tree again asserts that “yt ys no boote / althoughe they cut me to
the roote;” for it would still “bud my branches freshe and grene” the
following spring (25–6, 28). And the tree cuts off further questions by
suddenly addressing the maid with a warning:
And you fair maide canne not do so

for yf you let youre maidhode goe
then will yt never no more be sene
as I with my braunches can growe grene. (29–32)
The maid blushes and turns away. The moment of revelation for the
reader is also the maid’s; the maid now suffers “marvelous dowbte” –
a doubt based on the intimation that has driven her insistent questions,
for she is “suspecting still what she would wene / Her maid heade
lost would never be seen” (39–40). This sudden change of subject
would not arrive unexpectedly for early modern readers, who would
have encountered many such literary allusions to sexual escapades on
May Day.
The ballad dramatizes the point at which the “maid heade” appears
in the poem by halting the maid’s repetitive questioning abruptly with
the tree’s accusatory warning. In the moment in which the audience
recognizes the ballad’s theme as the loss of sexual honor, the maid
recognizes in herself the role of endangered virgin. Her merely walking
by the hawthorn tree, initially narrated without commentary, now sug-
gests brazen self-advertisement, and we learn that she has tricked herself
out in finery: she sighs “to se howe she maide her selff so gay / to walke
to se and to be sene / and so outfaced the hathorne grene” (42–4). Once
inducted into this new level of thematic significance, we readers can
perceive the maid’s doubts and her fear “to losse the thinge that shuldbe
sene / to growe as were the hathorne grene” (478). The revelation that
forces her into anxious self-introspection places us, as readers, in a posi-
tion of superior knowledge.
The narrator’s role reinforces the distancing of the audience’s aware-
ness from that of the maid. First, we learn to see her as imperiled
virgin; then, in the final stanza, the narrator alludes to an anonymous
community of observers:
But after this never I could here

of this faire mayden Anywhere
that ever she was in forest sene
to talke againe of the hathorne grene. (49–52)
The narrator, we understand, has “heard” this story from one “of my
countre,” and likewise has learned of its consequences for the maid.
Now, the audience perceives the maid as a public object within the
ballad narrative; an anonymous audience reports on and interprets her
actions (or lack of action), and this audience includes the narrator and
us. As participants in this community, we can appreciate the laughter
implicit in the narrator’s dryly noting that the maid is never seen in
public “to talke againe of the hathorne grene.” Heightening the con-
trast between the reader’s initial ignorance of the stakes of the poem
(although, like the maid, the reader may well have had an inkling all
along) and the revelation that includes us in the implied public of the
maid’s observers sharpens the pleasure of finding ourselves among a
knowing public.
While the hawthorn tree warns the maid that public flourishing
is forbidden her, the ballad repeatedly asserts that virginity “shuldbe
sene” and should, in fact, display itself as does the hawthorn, “faire and
cleane” and “freshe and grene.” The tree’s heroic self-publicizing courts
its destruction, as does the maid’s sexual honor, which she must both
display and hide from her imagined public’s desires. In the final stanza,
the narrator resolves this paradox by evoking a community of observers
who know the maid’s story and speak of her as no longer available for
view. Only the publication through rumor of her seclusion and inaccess-
ibility fulfills the ballad’s demand that the maid display her sexual honor
while hiding herself. In contrast, the tree represents a utopian vision
combining public display and fertility: the more it is seen, the more
quickly destroyed, and yet “more and more my twedgs growe grene” (20).
The tree’s wonderful powers of self-renewal provide a foil for the maid’s
tragic vulnerability to “deflowering.”
Just as the maid in the ballad is chastened and reforms once the
hawthorn tree has identified her as a woman imperiled, the ballad’s
female readers are meant to recognize themselves in the ballad heroine
and avoid her fate. This generic convention provides the basis for a
witty inversion of expectations in another comic ballad about women’s
sexual notoriety, William Elderton’s “The Pangs of Love and Lovers
Fittes” (1559).9 Elderton’s narrator attempts to persuade his mistress to
grant him “good will” by citing famous illicit liaisons, including those
of Cressida and Helen of Troy, the literary heroines with whom various
characters in All’s Well That Ends Well associate Helena. The narrator of
“The Pangs and Fits” repeatedly emphasizes the publication and dis-
semination of stories about famous love affairs, using phrases such as
“I read sometime,” “as the stories tell,” and “by learned lore”; but these
usually cautionary tales are now to inspire his mistress to “fall” herself.
As in “The Hawthorn Tree,” the speaker invites the audience to share
the spectacle of a woman (in this case, the ballad’s addressee) in danger
of imitating sexually truant female archetypes. Here, the endangered
woman is explicitly envisioned as a reader or hearer, both of this poem
and of the “learned lore” that the narrator cites. The ballad parodies
the notion of exemplarity by reversing the expected relation between
woman-as-reader and woman-as-example: the addressee’s sympathy
with Cressida, Helen, and the others will lead her to imitate them
rather than to avoid their fates.10 As “The Hawthorn Tree” performs a
simultaneous inclusion of the reader and exclusion of the female sub-
ject, “The Pangs and Fits” splits the addressee, the mistress, from the
audience, who are meant to appreciate the irony by recognizing Helen
and Cressida as cautionary examples and acknowledging the narrator’s
duplicitous wit.
Linked in contemporary works by their common historical context,
their sexual availability, and their inconstancy, Helen of Troy and
Cressida provide particularly apposite examples for the authors of
ballads on fallen women. The later ballad “All in a Green Meadowe”
(c. 1620–50), in which a maiden laments her virginity, turns to Helen
of Troy and Cressida to represent sexually satisfied women: “Hellen of
greece for bewty was the rarest, / a wonder of the world, & certainly the
ffairest; / yet wold she, nor Cold shee, live a maiden still.” Women like
Cressida, who first accept and then reject their lovers, will find them-
selves begging for sexual favors: “[If they be li]ke to Cressus to scorne soe
true a freind, / [Theyle be] glad to receive poore Charitye in the end.”11
This comic ballad relies on the audience’s familiarity with tragic ballads
of fallen women, in which famous females mourn the loss of chastity
that led to their fall from grace. “All in a Green Meadow” reverses the
tragic situation by having a lonely virgin complain of missing her
sexual chances. The speaker’s repeated use of the words “mourn,” “com-
plain,” and “lament,” her warning that “time past is not recalld againe,”
and her final injunction to “all maids” to be wise and avoid her fate all
remind the audience of more morally orthodox laments.
The fame of their heroines is an explicit subject of fallen-women
ballads, for notoriety is both sign and symptom of their falls. Public
exposure, as in “The Hawthorn Tree,” puts a woman in danger of los-
ing her honor and reveals the defective virtue that first led her to range
abroad. In another Cressida ballad, “A Complaint” (1580), Troilus
blames her for the “gadding moode” that led her to wander to the Greek
camp, “for wandering women, most men say / Cannot be good and
go astray” (1, 6–7). Now Troilus himself has further exposed Cressida
by narrating this ballad: “I pleasure not to blaze her blame … / But all
good women by her shame, / May learn what Catterwauling is” (2–5).
Cressida responds that had Troilus married her, “the blome of blame
had not been spread, / The seede of shame had not bine sowne” (28–9).
She accuses Troilus of contributing to her infamy. Both speakers agree
in locating two subjects of shame: Cressida’s wandering into the Greek
camp, and her dissemination through rumor and print. They only
debate whether Cressida’s “gadding” – into the Greek camp and into
print – signals her own volition or her lover’s failure to “keep” her.12
The theme of sexual publicity is strongly linked with social ambition
in the popular ballads on the mistresses of English kings.13 In these
ballads, particularly “Jane Shore” (1603) and “The Fair Maid of London”
(1600), women’s social and sexual falls result from their desire to become
public figures. King Edward speaks the first part of the Fair Maid’s ballad,
promising her that “In granting your love you will purchase renowne / … Great
ladies of honour shall ‘tend on thy traine” (37, 41).14 Jane Shore attributes
her fall to the vanity that led her first to display herself in her husband’s
goldsmith shop, spreading word of her beauty abroad until it reached
the ears of the king, and then to accede to the king’s desires.15 Shore’s
move “from City then to Court” brought her private access to the great;
“thus advanced on high / Commanding Edward with [her] eye,” she
“knew the secrets of a King,” and became the object of others’ gazes:
“For when I smil’d, all men were glad, / But when I mourn’d, my Prince
grew sad” (43–66). The attention of “all men” becomes her punishment
when Richard III forces Shore to do penance in the street, “Where many
thousands did me view, / Who late in Court my credit knew”; now she
and her husband offer her story as a warning to other women (87–8).
Like Cressida’s “Complaint,” the ballad exhibits little interest in Shore’s
sexual relationships but a great deal in her public exposure. In the
ballads, Cressida’s and Shore’s crimes are not primarily debauchery or
licentiousness, but vanity and the desire for public attention.
To English Renaissance writers, Jane Shore represented a domestic
analogue of Helen and Cressida, the fallen women of Troy. In his
imitation of Ovid’s Heroides, England’s Heroicall Epistles (1597), Michael
Drayton replaces the letters of complaint or seduction exchanged by
Helen of Troy and Paris, Dido and Aeneas with letters by Edward IV
and Jane Shore, Henry II and Rosamond.16 Cressida, Helen of Troy,
Jane Shore, Rosamond, and the Fair Maiden comprise a coherent class
of heroines. To mention one is to evoke the others. Drayton drew on
Samuel Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond (1592) to write both Jane Shore’s
and Rosamond’s letters.17 Daniel, in turn, has his Rosamond mention

Jane Shore’s popularity to defend the publication of her lament; and
in their respective ballads, Jane Shore and the Fair Maid defend their
self-display with Rosamond’s example.18 By the end of the seventeenth
century, the association of Helen of Troy and Cressida with Jane Shore
and Rosamond was utterly formulaic in ballad literature. As the 1707
ballad “Of King Edward and Jane Shore” proclaims,
Hellen of Greece she came of Spartan blood,

Agricola and Cressida they were brave Whores and good …
These were the Ladies that caus’d the Trojan Sack,
But Jane Shore, Jane Shore she spoil’d King Edward’s Back.19
Such ballads link ancient and medieval fallen women to underline a

common narrative of desire, publicity, and punishment: the women all
traded sexual honor to serve personal ambition and were punished by
public shaming through the dissemination of their stories.
As public objects, fallen women continue to tantalize audiences’
appetites long after they can no longer transgress with their mortal
lovers. Faustus’s notorious resurrection of Helen of Troy to satisfy his lust
in Christopher Marlowe’s play may be taken as paradigmatic of the pub-
licized whore’s symbolic sexual availability. Having once, like Cressida,
made herself the object of male desire through her “gadding mood,” the
public whore eternally repeats the sin of accessibility as the subject of
ballads and licentious allusion. As narrators of ballads that reveal their
sexual history, famous women compound their guilt, even though they
offer moral advice and plead for the audience’s sympathy. A sixteenth-
century comic poem found by Frederick Moulton riddles on “penis,”
which is a “wand,” “sting,” “pole,” and finally, when wielded by Helen
of Troy, a “pen.” The author portrays Helen of Troy as author of both
her sexual acts and, figuratively, her publication; the penis “is the pen
fayre Helen tooke / to wright within her two leavd booke.” The agency
Helen achieves as the figurative holder of the pen suggests that she is
the author not only of her original transgressions, but of her continuing
defamation.20 This marvelous pun suggests that Helen took pleasure in
both the loss of her honor and the writing of her story – she is not only
her own lover but her own writer and book, while both her lover and
the authors who depict her are reduced to mere instruments.
I have argued that the representation of these women in English
ballads focused largely on their status as public objects both before
and after death. However, the significance of such a status is vexed.
Alongside the explicit moral condemnation of women’s public exposure

in these ballads are positive views of public women that emphasize
audiences’ sympathy and public women’s positive influence over other
women. Such ballads pose the question of whether audiences who,
like Faustus, eagerly revivify Helen and her crimes for their pleasure
are compounding the public woman’s sexual truancy or participating
in a reparative social ritual. Moreover, these ballads implicitly probe
whether the audience’s interest in the heroine generates desire that is
morally regenerative or defiling. Christopher Brooke’s narrative poem
The Ghost of Richard the Third (1614) depicts Jane Shore as the object of a
voracious feminine sympathy. His Richard III declares that Shore’s “fate
the women so commisserate / that who (to see my justice on that sin-
ner) / Drinks not her tears: and makes her fact, their dinner?”21 Richard
III’s sardonic view of Jane’s audience suggests that they take an impious
and voyeuristic pleasure in bemoaning her downfall. Throughout these
ballads and the commentary on their reception runs the suspicion that
the relation between sexualized heroine and sympathetic audience is
itself ethically suspect, and perhaps itself eroticized. Accordingly, pub-
lication as a sexualized subject can either punish or comfort: Cressida
identifies her publication as a source of further shame, while Jane Shore
and Rosamond vie for prominence and public sympathy.
Household Ambition and Exposure in All’s Well

That Ends Well
In All’s Well, fictions construct public roles through various genres,

and the genre within which one is presented as the subject of a narra-
tive can either establish or endanger one’s social status. The genres of
romance and ballad, for example, offer different modes of public action,
each with its own social inflection. To take up a role in one of these
modes is to enter the privileged space of public action; and to enter the
public space of the court, the military parade, or the battlefield entails
specific modes of publication: the broadsheet, ceremonial display, the
public reading of personal letters, rumor, and ballads. All’s Well is a play
acutely conscious of gradations both in socially constructed private and
public spaces and in the punishments allotted to those who too ambi-
tiously presume to “publish” themselves, to become visible in order to
deserve great rewards. The various forms of exposure, the roles that
these forms offer to public persons, and the status markers of forms of
publicity are contested by characters attempting to negotiate the terms
of their entrance into public view.
Shakespeare presents his heroine Helena as a reluctant subject of

public discourse. Her desire to marry her mistress’s son Bertram, articu-
lated in passionate soliloquy in the first scene, makes her the subject of
leering public discussion: the Clown sings ballads linking her to Helen
of Troy, Lafew compares her to Cressida, and a printed broadside is
written about her. As a woman determined to rise above her station,
she is linked consistently with cheap print and fallen women. For her
fellow servant Parolles, encountering the public view provokes a similar
kind of punishment: humiliating exposure as the sexualized object of
communal laughter and scorn. He suffers the fate of the comic outsider
ritually excluded from the community of the play, “even to the world’s
pleasure and the increase of laughter,” as the Clown taunts (2.4.36–7).
Helena’s fear of becoming the sexual subject of “odious ballads” is
matched by Parolles’ series of humiliations at the hands of Lafew and
the French lords, which take the form of ritualistic exposure and meta-
phorical whippings that Lafew invests with sexual humiliation.
Helena’s and Parolles’ ventures into public space occur against a
backdrop of apparently private space: the household of the Countess
of Rossillion. There are few references to households in Shakespeare’s
direct source, “Giletta of Narbonne,” William Painter’s translation
of Boccaccio’s Decameron III.9. In transforming Painter’s Giletta to
his Helena, Shakespeare provided his heroine with a rich household
context: the Countess as mistress/mother figure, the Clown, Parolles,
and the Steward, all of which are absent in Painter and Boccaccio.
Although Painter explains that Giletta grew up in the house of
Beltramo’s father, we have no description of the household members
at the time of the story. There is apparently no head of the household,
because Giletta returns after her marriage to find “that through the
Countes [Bertram’s, or Beltramo’s] absence all thinges were spoiled
and out of order.”22 In describing this return, Painter never refers to
Rossillion as a house or mentions household members, but only the
Count’s “subjects” and his “country.” The Count’s knights and ladies
serve Giletta at need, but they may not reside in the Count’s house-
hold. Rossillion is a political unit of subjects and lord, and Painter
describes their relations in terms of feudal rights and duties. Giletta
“restored all the countrie againe to their auncient liberties,” earning
the subjects’ “harty love and affection.”23 Giletta’s success at ruling
Rossillion provides a compelling proof of her noble nature and helps
to convince the Count finally to accept her. Giletta’s role as proxy
ruler and the loyalty that she inspires are thus important features of
the plot that Shakespeare imitated, but he chose to replace Giletta,
benign ruler, with the Countess, “noble housewife,” and her various
dependents.24
Shakespeare’s Rossillion household represents domestic life as a sphere
defined by property ownership, a social body dependent on its owner
for political, devotional, social, and economic regulation.25 Ownership
governs social status in the play; characters are either owners or mas-
ters, like the Countess, Lafew, and the King, or they are servants and
dependents, like Helena, Parolles, and the Clown. Relations between
characters of different status are structured by figurative property rela-
tions, as articulated most directly by Lafew: “I have kept of them tame,
and know their natures,” he declares of the servant Parolles and his
ilk (2.5.45–6). Those mastered are objects of their masters’ knowledge.
Bertram rejects the idea of marrying Helena for similar reasons of famili-
arity and dependence: “I knew her well: / She had her breeding at my
father’s charge” (2.3.113–14).26 As Lafew thinks of “tame” men, Bertram
attributes to Helena the quality of the domestic animal “bred” in the
household.
These attempts to establish personal mastery belie Bertram’s and
Lafew’s own legal subordination to the King, to whom Bertram is
“now in ward, evermore in subjection” (1.1.5). All’s Well is frequently
concerned with how mastery is asserted and wielded rhetorically:
while Helena’s dependent status disqualifies her in Bertram’s eyes, her
supporters declare her a natural mistress. Angry at her son’s asperity,
the Countess demotes him and hyperbolically elevates Helena: “she
deserves a lord / That twenty such rude boys might tend upon / And
call her, hourly, mistress” (3.2.81–4). Lafew also promotes Helena to
universal mistress in recognition of her “dear perfection,” which “hearts
that scorn’d to serve / Humbly call’d mistress” (5.3.17–19). Parolles and
Helena escape their household roles (however briefly) by going to the
court, but for both of these ambitious servants success and failure are
figured by household relations of servitude and mastery. The play thus
reveals the performative aspect of early modern discourse on privacy:
while the metaphor of “private” ownership structures social relations
both inside and outside the Countess’s household, the household is no
haven from public scrutiny or hierarchical power relations. The house-
hold is private only as a social space owned by the Countess, and this
private property is a stage on which each member is fully on display,
performing before the rest of the household and the public at large.
At first glance, Helena’s situation in All’s Well That Ends Well hardly
suggests that of the pursued woman of ballad literature. If anything,
Helena seems to be in danger of never falling, of becoming a “withered
pear,” in Parolles’ phrase for “old virginity” (1.1.160–63). Helena is

the passionate unrequited lover rather than the seducer’s victim; even
when he has married her, Bertram swears to “never bed her” (2.3.270).
Susan Snyder has argued that Helena’s name is ironic: while Helen of
Troy was a notorious object of lust, Helena must trick her husband into
bed.27 Yet Shakespeare sets each stage of Helena’s pursuit of Bertram in
a context of public observation and bawdy commentary. The Steward
overhears Helena’s confession of love; Helena must appear before a
bantering audience at court; her cure of the King elicits the publication
of a broadside; and she must ceremoniously choose her husband before
the court. The atmosphere of lewd commentary that accompanies each
of her moments of public exposure gives content to her fear of “Tax of
impudence / A strumpet’s boldness, a divulged shame / traduc’d by
odious ballads” (2.1.170–72). The public role that Helena assumes in
her pursuit of Bertram also opens her to the charge of social ambition,
a charge to which she is highly sensitive from her first appearance in
the play. Indeed, the “impudence” and “boldness” that she cites apply
to both sexual and social presumptions, for the two are closely linked
in the cultural archetype of the “strumpet.” The fallen women of
ballad literature were often depicted as ambitious social climbers who,
like Jane Shore, sought attention and status through liaisons with men
of higher status.
Helena is painfully aware of the ominous social implications of her
passion for Bertram; her first soliloquy takes place after the departing
Bertram has reminded her of her place: “Be comfortable to my mother,
your mistress, / and make much of her” (1.1.74–5). Alone, Helena
contemplates her position: “Th’ ambition in my love thus plagues
itself, / The hind that would be mated by the lion / Must die for love”
(1.1.90–92). This startling image places sexual desire in a context of
physical danger and miscegenation. Helena alters the Petrarchan motif
of male hunter and female hunted found, for example, in Thomas
Wyatt’s “Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind.” Helena’s ver-
sion adds another layer of signification – that of social status. “Hind”
suggests not only the hunted animal, but the familiar servant. While
the OED gives the simple meaning “a servant,” contextual readings sug-
gest that the word can be demeaning (n.2, 1–2). In Arden of Faversham
(1592), the servant Mosby’s cutting remarks to his lover and mistress
Alice give the word’s bestial associations a contemptuous charge: “Go,
get thee gone, a copesmate for thy hinds!”28 Both Mosby’s and Helena’s
imagery captures the intensity of social transgression inherent in hetero-
sexual servant–master liaisons, but while Mosby’s accusation imbues
a mistress’s sexual interest in her servants with shame, Helena imagines

a mating with her master as dangerous rather than shameful. Helena’s
imagined destruction in the act of sexual union extends the conven-
tional sexual quibble on “dying for love” to a brutally literal extreme.
Here, Bertram is both lord and master and wild and predatory lion; this
despite the fact that Bertram neither pursues Helena nor recognizes her
love. For Helena, her difference in status from Bertram alone suggests
that he is dangerous to her. In her image, the gentle hind goes to meet
its wild predator, and its death, gladly. Despite this speech’s images of
complaisance – Helena admits that “In his bright radiance and collat-
eral light / Must I be comforted, not in his sphere” (1.1.88–9) and “my
idolatrous fancy / Must sanctify his relics” (1.1.97–8) – she is still “the
hind that would be mated by the lion,” and Helena will repeatedly
assert that she is ready to die for love. She elevates her desire by embrac-
ing its possibly destructive outcome. The overtones of this speech are
not hopelessness and passivity, but intimations of the heroic cast that
Helena will give to her quest to win Bertram.
One prominent strain of criticism on All’s Well reads this first soliloquy
as a statement of the virginal passivity that Helena must eschew in
order to pursue Bertram; the play thus seeks to overcome both Helena’s
and Bertram’s anxieties about sexuality and marriage. Robert Grams
Hunter has provided the most optimistic version of this account, argu-
ing that by surmounting their sexual restraints, Helena and Bertram
revivify and transform a decrepit and sterile society. Similarly, for Robert
Adams the play idealizes procreation in order to redeem sexuality from
the taint of lust.29 However, other critics, like Richard Wheeler, Carol
Thomas Neely, and Janet Adelman, have seen less utopian consummation
and more deep-seated sexual anxiety in the sexual thematics of All’s
Well.30 Views of the play that emphasize the problematic reconciliation
of marriage and sexuality make use of Helena’s association with two
female archetypes: Diana and Helen of Troy. Each figure represents one
side of Helena’s character: Diana her chastity and restraint, and Helen
her intense sexual desire for Bertram.31 I contend that Helena actively
assumes the positive role of “Diana’s knight,” while the repeated nega-
tive associations with famous fallen women are assigned to Helena by
others. To take Diana and Helen of Troy as roughly equivalent female
archetypes for the two sides of Helena’s sexuality erases their social
connotations: Helen of Troy is not usually a figure for feminine desire,
but for the eroticized object of social opprobrium.
Helena’s sexual choices reflect her dependent social position and the
play’s context of real threats of public shame and infamy. All’s Well’s
theme of virginity and sexuality, I argue, is inseparable from the theme

of mastery and dependency and its careful depiction of the dangers and
rewards that public attention offers Helena. When she admits her feel-
ings to the Countess, Helena first excuses her love for Bertram as “poor,
but honest,” like her upbringing; she will not dare to claim love from
him, but “Indian-like … adore / The sun that looks upon his worshipper /
But knows of him no more” (1.3.195; 204–07). Here, she disavows any
expectation of Bertram’s raising her to his own social level, since their
status difference precludes marriage. Nevertheless, she appeals to the
Countess’s own experience of love:
… O then, give pity

To her whose state is such that cannot choose
But lend and give where she is sure to lose;
That seeks not to find that her search implies,
But riddle-like lives sweetly where she dies! (1.3.209–12)
The “riddle” alludes to the symbolic end of the “hind”: both the possible
“death” of her virginity and the threatening social implications of her
love for Bertram.32 Helena is not simply any woman in love, but one
“whose state is such” that finding “that her search implies,” Bertram’s
love, would mean disaster. We see just such a disaster when Diana,
claiming Bertram as husband, meets with universal calumny in the final
scene. The laments of women who lose their honor to socially superior
men use similar riddling metaphors, as the “Fair Maid” does:
Oh, wanton King Edward! thy labour is vaine

To follow the pleasure thou canst not attaine,
Which getting, thou losest, and having, dost wast it,
The which if thou purchase, is spoil’d if thou hast it.
But if thou obtainst it, thou nothing hast won;
And I, losing nothing, yet quite am undone;
But if of that Jewell a King doe deceive me,
No King can restore, though a Kingdom he give me.33 (53–60)
Here, as in Helena’s many allusions to “dying for love,” the paradox

of spoiling by gaining refers to a loss of sexual honor that ends in the
woman’s death. Likewise, Dido, Phillis, and the “desperate damsel” die
of despair; the king’s wife Eleanor poisons Rosamond; the gentlewoman
of “The Lady’s Fall” dies of shame; and Jane Shore “for her Wanton Life
came to a Miserable End.” Helena connects death with public shame
and ballad publication in her strange wager with the King, offering to
venture not only “Tax of impudence / traduc’d by odious ballads” but
“worse of worst, extended / With vildest torture, let my life be ended”
(2.1.170–73).34
By the time Helena states her fear of the taint of sexual errancy we
have already seen it realized. The public revelation of her love for
Bertram unfolds gradually in a scene that opens with the Countess
and two of her familiar servants, her steward and clown. The Countess
announces that the absent Helena will be the subject of this scene:
“I will now hear. What say you of this gentlewoman?” (1.3.1–2).35 A series
of incongruous digressions follow, and apparently the play only returns
to Helena 122 lines later. First the Steward explains that he wishes to
avoid speaking of his services to the Countess, for we “make foul the
clearness of our deservings, when of ourselves we publish them” (1.3.6–7);
then the Countess reminds the Clown of his bad reputation: “the
complaints I have heard of you I do not all believe” (1.3.9–10). This
sequence captures the general atmosphere of public judgment in a
play insistently concerned with public performances, audiences who
evaluate even ordinary acts, and the dissemination of a person’s “credit”
through rumor and allegation. Before the Steward can speak the Clown
breaks out into witty denunciations of marriage and women’s perfidy.
When the Countess accuses the Clown of being a “foul-mouth’d and
calumnious knave” (1.3.56–7), he defends himself as a singer of ballads
and a purveyor of known truths:
A prophet I, madam, and I speak the truth the next way:

For I the ballad will repeat
Which men full true shall find:
Your marriage comes by destiny,
Your cuckoo sings by kind. (1.3.60–64)
Ballads convey “truth the next way,” the Clown asserts, for “destiny”
and “kind” dictate their subjects. In the role of ballad singer and
seller, the Clown publishes adultery as “full true” history and, by
the same token, prophecy, using the logic of exemplarity that we
have seen in the ballads of fallen women. The subject of the scene,
we assume, is still Helena, despite the long deferral of the Steward’s
report. The Clown does offer a “prophecy” of sorts: his scurrilous
ballads anticipate the announcement that Helena loves Bertram. The
Clown projects a degraded version of events before they are officially
disseminated.36
The Clown continues his derisive allusions to Helena’s situation by

evoking her famous namesake, Helen of Troy:
Was this fair face the cause, quoth she,

Why the Grecians sacked Troy?
Fond done, done fond,
Was this King Priam’s joy? …
Among nine bad if one be good,
There’s yet one good in ten. (1.3.70–79)
Here, Shakespeare stages the Clown’s strategic use of a familiar ballad

to demean Helena by association. Even before the discovery of her
secret, Helena is publicized in the company of ballad heroines and the
context of sexual disorder. As with the maid in “The Hawthorn Tree,”
the audience recognizes in Helena’s story the ballad plot of the fallen
woman. Apparently the Clown quotes a well-known ballad, for the
Countess recognizes that he has taken liberties with it: “What, one
good in ten? You corrupt the song, sirrah” (1.3.80–81). The Clown has
not only changed “nine good” to “nine bad,” but changed the subject
from Paris (“King Priam’s joy”) to Helen, because “And we might have a
good woman born but or every blazing star or at an earthquake, ’twould
mend the lottery well; a man may draw his heart out ere ’a pluck one”
(1.3.86–9).37 An audience familiar with this ballad would note that
the Clown has both redirected a ballad about Paris to attack Helen and
changed the words to make Helen of Troy represent all women. The
Clown’s “corruption” of the song attempts to impose on Helena a public
role as “Example to all Wicked Livers” or “Warning for Women,” like
Jane Shore and Helen of Troy.
In “The Hawthorn Tree,” the audience’s recognition of the imperiled-
virgin plot unites them with the narrator and an imagined public
enjoying the spectacle of the maid’s shame. Here, however, Helena
herself describes her desires and the danger she faces before we
encounter the Clown’s mockery. When he makes Helena a subject of
scandal, the audience is distanced from this demeaning reinterpreta-
tion of her desires. Here, it is the Clown who is isolated; we have been
forewarned by the Countess about his knavery. She points out that the
Clown strategically “corrupts” the ballad to slander Helena; finally,
she rebukes him and sends him away. As in The Winter’s Tale, in this
scene Shakespeare assumes in his audience a skeptical attitude towards
the truth of ballads.38 The Clown’s association of Helena with Helen of
Troy is the very “tax of impudence” that Helena has feared from “odious
ballads”; a revelation not of her sexual transgressions, but of the cost of

a servant moving to public notice within the household.
This scene moves from self-promotion to rumor and, finally, to the
circulation of ballads, suggesting the range of forms that publicity takes
in All’s Well. No space remains private here; although Helena thought
that she “did communicate to herself her own words to her own ears,”
such ideal self-communion is hardly possible in this play (1.3.107–08).
Instead, the play returns insistently to the public exposure of Helena’s
desires. The Countess’s discovery of Helena’s love for her son is a promi-
nent example. The Folio stage direction calls for Helena to enter, but she
remains silent while the Countess muses about her, perhaps watching
her from across the stage. To the Countess, Helena’s appearance reveals
her secret with “the show and seal of nature’s truth … Her eye is sick
on’t; I observe her now” (1.3.132, 136). The Countess continues:
… now to all sense ’tis gross:

You love my son. Invention is ashamed
Against the proclamation of thy passion
To say thou dost not. Therefore tell me true;
But tell me then, ’tis so; for, look, thy cheeks
Confess it t’one to th’other, and thine eyes
See it so grossly shown in thy behaviours
That in their kind they speak it … (1.3.168–74)
Although the Countess favors Helena’s affection for her son, she uses
the language of shame and exposure; she calls the evidence of Helena’s
love “gross” twice, and says that Helena’s passion is “appeach’d,” her
eyes “confess it” and “only sin / And hellish obstinacy tie thy tongue”
(1.3.179–91). The Countess is play-acting the judgment that everyone
in the play expects her to make against Helena. While the Countess
is not really against her, Shakespeare repeatedly frames Helena as a
defendant exposed to a judging audience.
Like the Clown, the nobleman Lafew associates Helena with a famous
fallen woman; in his case, it is Cressida. Lafew has appeared as the
judicious elder statesman and friend of the Countess, but he strikes a
merrily salacious pose in presenting Helena to the King. He promises
that Helena’s “simple touch / Is powerful to raise King Pippen, nay, / To
give great Charlemain a pen in’s hand / And write to her a love-line”
(2.1.75–8). The bawdy joke in Helena’s “raising” King Pippin and giving
Charlemagne a “pen in’s hand” recurs in Bertram’s response to hearing
that the King’s cure has procured him a wife: “But follows it, my lord,
to bring me down / Must answer for your raising?” (2.3.112–13).39 Bertram

has cause to resent Helena, but Lafew has none; Lafew apologizes twice
for his “light deliverance” on the subject of Helena, but nevertheless the
ribald connotations of this event are too compelling for him to resist,
for he adds, “I am Cressid’s uncle / That dare leave two together. Fare
you well” (2.1.97–8). Helena again recalls irresistibly to her audience the
famous stories of ambitious, sexually available women. After this, her
request for “from your royal thoughts / a modest one to bear me back
again” and her fear of being “traduc’d by odious ballads” seem justified
(2.1.127–8, 172). The public reaction to the King’s cure also appears
in Lafew and Parolles’ dialogue, in which Lafew places Helena and
the King in bawdy contexts and again excuses himself. Furthermore,
Helena now has become the subject of a printed broadsheet taking her
as a miraculous agent of the divine, “A showing of a heavenly effect
in an earthly actor” (2.3.23–4). This positive representation of Helena’s
actions depends, however, on the same logic of exemplarity as the
sexual associations with Cressida and Helen of Troy.
Helen combats these threats with her own construction of public
roles. The conceptual opposition of Helen of Troy and Diana, to which
many critics of the play have pointed, structures Helena’s public
personae.40 However, while other characters connect her to Helen
of Troy, it is Helena herself who invokes Diana, referring to herself
as “Diana’s knight.” More appropriate to the generalized Diana
myth would have been “Diana’s nymph,” or perhaps “Diana’s vestal,”
emphasizing her chastity. Instead, Shakespeare chooses for Helena’s self-
portraiture the heroic image of the female knight devoted to chastity; as
E. M. W. Tillyard pointed out, this description recalls Spenser’s Britomart.41
Spenser treats Helen of Troy as Britomart’s opposite number; in Canto 9
of The Faerie Queene, he apologizes for the forthcoming “odious argu-
ment,” which will introduce a “paragone / of evill” in that “wanton
Lady” Hellenore, a latter-day Helen of Troy. Still, “white seemes fayrer,
macht with blacke attone,” and Hellenore’s perfidy demonstrates, by
contrast, Britomart’s chastity.42 As Mihoko Suzuki observes, “Britomart’s
errancy, set against Hellenore’s subjugation, emerges as a sign of her
independence and freedom.”43 The female knight in chivalric romance
provided a positive model of public, desiring femininity, and it is
this model to which Helena turns to combat Helen of Troy’s tainted
public role.
Helena describes the attainment of her love as a quest.44 The Steward
reports Helena’s complaint that Diana is no “queen of virgins, that
would suffer her poor knight surpris’d without rescue in the first assault
or ransom afterward” (1.3.114–16). Here, Helena’s connection to Diana

is explicitly martial; Helena is no votary but an adventurer. She offers
to “venture / The well-lost life of mine on his Grace’s cure,” and the
Countess responds in like spirit: “I’ll stay at home and pray God’s bless-
ing unto thine attempt” (1.3.247–54). “Attempt” here, like “venture,”
has the trappings of glory, and Helena also uses the word in this sense:
Impossible be strange attempts to those

That weigh their pains in sense, and do suppose
What hath been cannot be. Who ever strove
To show her merit, that did miss her love? (1.1.224–7)
Helena allies her “strange attempt” with others well known to the
audience by alluding to “what hath been,” assuming the familiarity of
stories of women who won their loves.45 Her references are to feminine
heroes who did not merely love faithfully but actively pursued their
loves by showing their worthiness. Such women were found in the
pages of chivalric romance: in Spenser, but also in Montemayor’s Diana,
Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, The Boke of Huon of Bordeaux, and the Amadis
cycle of romances; in the next chapter, I will explore romance heroines
at greater length.46
The play reinforces Helena’s allusions to fame through adventure
by juxtaposing the Countess and Helena’s farewell with the imme-
diately following farewell scene at court (2.1). This scene, in which
the King sends the French lords off to war, replicates the structure of
the Countess’s scene with Helena: the Countess’s final words promise
Helena “means and attendants,” while the King begins by dividing gifts
among the lords. He then admonishes them to
… see that you come

Not to woo honor, but to wed it, when
The bravest questant shrinks. Find what you seek,
That fame may cry you loud. (2.1.14–17)
The King’s marriage metaphor recalls Helena’s situation rather than

that of the anonymous French lords. Helena wishes to “show what
we alone must think, which never returns us thanks” (1.1.185–6).47
Demonstrating her merit publicly, in contrast, should bring her the
reward of fulfilling her “ambitious love.” Comparing this language to
that of “Jane Shore” and “Troilus and Cressida” demonstrates the
distinctiveness of Helena’s language of feminine merit. In the ballads
I have examined, the urge to show one’s merit condemns a woman to

wantonness and the stamp of “whore.” Helena conceives of a heroic
version of the public woman, and cites a body of familiar examples that
legitimate her self-publication as quest rather than fall. She embraces
the “death” threatened by social obloquy and transforms that threat
into proof of her own heroism.
Parolles: Shame and Publicity in the Household
Shakespeare places Helena among household dependents of similar

status, depicting with care the delicate maneuvering in the social space
between the Countess and her clown and steward, between the gentle
servants Helena and Parolles, and Parolles and his master Bertram.
We see the Steward report on Helena to their mistress and Parolles mock
Helena’s ambition and attempt to establish his authority over the
Clown. The social trajectories of Helena and Parolles are registered in
their relations with other servants: we see Parolles alter his address to
Helena when she becomes his mistress and the Clown exert a mocking
mastery over Parolles after his public fall.48
Helena and Parolles are particularly significant as a pair due to their
parallel positions and ambitions at the beginning of the play and the
similar threats of sexual exposure that they encounter. Shakespeare
links the two careers by using Parolles as a gauge of Helena’s social
success. In Act 2, news of Helena’s successes arrives in the midst of
Parolles’ struggles with Lafew. As Helena appears in triumph to choose
her reward, Parolles is still struggling to establish a social footing, and
while his pride is in a shambles the audience hears, through Lafew’s
scornful announcement, that Helena has become Parolles’ mistress.
As Janet Adelman has shown, Diana operates as a stand-in for Helena
in the final scene, in which she is decried as a prostitute, a “common
customer,” “an easy glove” that “goes off and on at pleasure,” a “com-
mon gamester” (5.3.188, 277–8, 286).49 While Diana incurs the sexual
opprobrium that Helena risked in her pursuit of Bertram, Parolles suffers
the social fall that Helena has evaded. The audience witnesses Helena’s
initial successes while Parolles’ status slips away; as Ryan Kiernan
has observed, it is Parolles “on whom the play can discharge its covert
aversion to its heroine.”50
Helena and Parolles’ first encounter occurs in the aftermath of cer-
emonial blessings and valedictions among the Countess’s family. When
the noble figures have left the stage, the two gentle servants meet and
acknowledge for a moment the divide that separates them from their
masters. Parolles’ mocking “Save you, fair queen!” is usually read as a

sexual innuendo (1.1.106). In readings of the play focusing on Bertram
and Helena’s movement towards marital sexuality, Parolles plays the
role of an unsavory catalyst: his crass remarks on sexual satisfaction in
this scene prompt Helena to greater acceptance of her own desires.51
This interpretation rehabilitates a dialogue once thought so improper
for Helena as to suggest an interpolation.52 However, it also deflects
interest from Parolles as a major subject of the play. Many critics argue
that Parolles’ greeting of Helena quibbles on “queen” / “quean”; Susan
Snyder has suggested a reference to one specific “queen / quean,” Helen
of Troy.53 But here, as so often in this play, sexual and status connota-
tions are inseparable. Helena responds to Parolles with an apparently
equivalent jest that has no sexual undertone:
Hel. “And you, monarch!”

Par. “No.”
Hel. “And no.”54 (1.1.107–09).
The interlocking structure of this exchange suggests that the epithets

“monarch” and “queen” are equivalent ways of ironically elevating the
two servants’ status, a pretense that is registered as such and rejected on
both sides by a terse “No.” The exchange exhibits Helena and Parolles’
resigned recognition of their subordinate positions in the Rossillion
household, very far from either monarch or queen.55
The ensuing dialogue fits into this context of social subordination.
When Parolles remarks “That you were made of is mettle to make
virgins,” the pun works not only in terms of sex but also of status: the
sexual act that “made” Helena (at her conception) also “makes” virgins by
advancing their social status (1.1.129–30).56 In this quibble, the “mettle”
of which Helena is made is both the sexual act and her virginity, which
can be sold to the highest bidder in marriage: “’Tis a commodity will
lose the gloss with lying; the longer kept, the less worth. Off with’t
while ’tis vendible; answer the time of request” (1.1.154–5). Helena
does not reject Parolles’ logic, but elevates its terms. She responds to
Parolles by wishing for an exchange in which she could “show” Bertram
“what we alone must think” (1.1.185). To show Bertram the effects of
her wishes would, Helena imagines, earn her his gratitude, while merely
wishing friends well “never / Returns us thanks” (1.1.185–6). Both
gentle servants here reflect on the possibility of social gain, and for
both, social and sexual promotion go hand in hand. Parolles’ insistence
on the sexual license attendant on social mastery provides an ironic
counterpoint to Helena’s wish for what she describes, vaguely and

euphemistically, as “thanks.”
Parolles indirectly returns to the subject of Helena’s social prospects
when he estimates the results of his own career at court: “I will return
perfect courtier; in the which my instruction will serve to naturalize
thee, so thou wilt be capable of a courtier’s counsel, and understand
what advice shall thrust upon thee … Get thee a good husband, and
use him as he uses thee” (1.1.214–15). Parolles puns bawdily on “under-
stand” (as in “stand under”), “capable” (as in “able to bear or carry”),
and “thrust” here: while he hopes to rise by behaving as a “perfect
courtier,” Helena can rise only by “under-standing” a courtier. Parolles
proposes mockingly that the new status of courtier will enable his sexual
domination of Helena. By making her “capable of a courtier’s counsel,”
his “instruction” will enable Helena to raise herself through marriage.
In the soliloquy that follows this dialogue, Helena again sublimates
Parolles’ crassly literal formulation into a vaguely heroic vision of
herself earning Bertram’s attention: “Who ever strove / To show her
merit that did miss her love?” (1.1.226–7). Parolles and Helena offer
differently inflected versions of what it might mean for a gentlewoman
to “show her merit,” but both assume that for Helena, social and sexual
gratification are one and the same goal. As Julie Crawford has noted,
this exchange between ambitious servants frames sexuality as a means
to the end of socioeconomic success.57
The logic of exchange in the “mettle”/“metal” pun appears again
when Parolles claims kinship with the young lords on the basis of his
military skill. “Noble heroes,” he declares, “my sword and yours are
kin. Good sparks and lustrous, a word, good metals” (2.1.40–41). As
Helena’s virginity is the “metal” that can buy her status, so is Parolles’
soldiership. Both her virginity and his soldiership make them “kin” to
nobility, but only by making their essence or “mettle” a commodity,
or “metal.” Having established the possibility of rising through self-
commodification, the play punishes Parolles for his ambition.58 The
French lords plot to prove “to what metal this counterfeit lump of
ore will be melted” (3.6.36–8). Thus the parallel between Helena and
Parolles in their ambition to “sell” themselves persists through the play
and highlights the difference in their destinies. Parolles is discovered as
a “counterfeit” while Helena, at first a counterfeit wife, “the name and
not the thing,” becomes the thing itself by counterfeiting Diana in
Bertram’s bed (5.3.307).59
Muriel Bradbrook argues that All’s Well dramatizes the distinction
between true nobility as an essential quality and mere outward honor,
and many critics have taken Parolles to demonstrate superficial honor,

while virtuous Helena is the thing itself.60 However, to sustain the
argument that Helena distinguishes herself against the “counterfeit”
Parolles requires explaining away Helena’s own successful counterfeits,
particularly the bed trick. All’s Well shows far more interest in how fic-
tions can realize identity and desire – can make the thing in the word’s
image. Helen can “be” Diana’s knight, Juno, Cressida, Venus, and Helen
of Troy, but Lafew and the French lords strip Parolles of the title of
“Captain” and publish him as “Tom Drum.”
As we have seen in early modern household orders, an elaborate
hierarchy of servants frames the Countess and demonstrates her virtu-
ous mastery. But Shakespeare, unlike the writers of household orders,
is very interested in how service and subordination create complex
social dilemmas among servants. The Clown, Helena, Parolles, and
the Steward edgily shoulder one another for a better position. The audi-
ence sees the Clown and Steward compete for the Countess’s attention,
the Steward report to the Countess on Helena, the Countess rebuke the
Steward, Parolles attempt and miserably fail to establish his superior-
ity over the Clown, and the Countess engage in playful sexual banter
with the Clown. These scenes depict a hierarchical social environment
characterized by strategic assertions of domination or subordination.
The strategies employed call on conventional master and servant
roles, as we see in scenes between Helena and Parolles, the Clown and
the Countess, and Parolles and Lafew where beatings, sexual submis-
sion, and public shame are implicitly or explicitly linked to servitude.
On the other hand, social success and publicly recognized virtue are
equated with mastery. As “The Hawthorn Tree” dramatizes its heroine’s
assignment to the role of the fallen woman of ballads, in All’s Well
Shakespeare repeatedly addresses the question of how narratives assign
public roles, especially to subordinates. As usual, the Clown comically
articulates social problems. When Parolles protests that “I spake but by
a metaphor,” the Clown refuses to distinguish real from literary effects:
“Indeed, sir, if your metaphor stink I will stop my nose, or against any
man’s metaphor” (5.2.12–13).
The relationship between the Clown and the Countess demonstrates
both the flexibility of hierarchy in All’s Well and how characters
attempt to establish mastery over others. In their witty exchanges the
Clown repeatedly eroticizes the service relation, while the Countess
both encourages his familiarity and defuses its subversive potential.61
Act 2, Scene 2, a scene with no apparent relation to either Helena’s or
Parolles’ plots, allows the Countess and the Clown to engage in more
of the intimate, playfully aggressive joking that we have already seen

between them. The clown takes as his subject not Helena but the larger
category into which both Helena and Parolles now fall, that of the
ambitious gentle person at court. The Clown imagines the successful
courtier as a universally pleasing servant with “an answer will serve all
men” (2.2.13–14). What follows reinforces the implication that courtly
service is a kind of prostitution. The Countess urges the Clown on to
ever bawdier visions of “service,” as the Clown compares his answer to
“a barber’s chair that fits all buttocks,” as fit as “the nail to his hole, the
cuckold to his horn, as a scolding quean to a wrangling knave, as the
nun’s lip to the friar’s mouth; nay, as the pudding to his skin,” and
the Countess continues to feed him more line with “Will your answer
serve fit to all questions? … Have you, I say, an answer of such fitness? …
It must be an answer of most monstrous size …” (2.2.16–32).62
Shakespeare reminds us, however, that the mistress of the household
is also restricted by her gendered role and its social dangers. He fixes the
audience’s attention on the Countess’s behavior, as he did on Lafew’s
“lightsome discourse,” by having her excuse herself. The Countess twice
seeks to explain her enjoyment of the Clown’s discourse: “To be young
again, if we could, I will be a fool in question” (2.2.38–9). The Countess
must excuse the liberty that she allows and even encourages her fool
to take because it creates a familiarity between herself and her male
servant that is dangerous in both its social and its sexual permissiveness.
A mistress’s command of her male servants already destabilizes the
principle of male dominance, as the Clown blurts out in one of his
incongruous yet telling remarks: “That man should be at woman’s com-
mand, and yet no hurt done!” (1.3.92–3). The Countess again refers to her
questionable conduct: “I play the noble housewife with the time, to enter-
tain it so merrily with a fool” (2.2.60–61). A “noble housewife” suggests
a generous hostess, but it also implies that the Countess is transgressing
both the status boundary between noble lady and common housewife
and the sexual boundary between honest lady and wanton “huswife.”63
Despite the Countess’s stated misgivings, the wordplay between
mistress and servant emphasizes rather than subverts their status differ-
ence. The Countess tricks the Clown by changing their role-play from
courtly themes – pleas for patronage (“Sir, I am a poor friend of yours
that loves you”) and offers of hospitality (“I think, sir, you can eat none
of this homely meat”) – to the plot of subservience: “You were lately
whipt, sir, as I think” (2.2.42–50). She reasserts mastery over the Clown
when she evokes a scene in which he has been beaten. The joke turns
on the Clown’s inadvertently asking her for more beating: “O Lord sir!
Spare not me” (2.2.51). Here, as we will see in Lafew’s treatment of

Parolles, the imagined beating is a synecdoche for the situation of
servility.64 The Clown closes the encounter with another play on their
respective positions, although this time in an image of procreation.
“You understand me?” the Countess asks, sending him away; the
Clown replies “Most fruitfully” (2.2.68–70). He places himself in the
role that Parolles assigned Helena: the sexually dominated (and symbol-
ically feminine) partner who “under-stands” his or her superior. As the
Countess encourages the Clown with innocent but leading remarks,
his bawdy responses allow her to “play the noble housewife” without
compromising her status.
The following scene between Lafew and Parolles mirrors the master/
servant roles of the Countess and Clown, but without their playfulness;
now, fudging status distinctions brings real consequences as Lafew forci-
bly re-establishes the social hierarchy.65 In their exchange on the King’s
cure, Parolles has implicitly claimed parity with Lafew by echoing him,
interrupting Lafew’s every utterance to add: “Right, so I say … Just, you
say well; so would I have said” (2.3.13–19). Lafew destroys this pretense
of equality by referring pointedly to “your lord and master,” much as
Bertram instructed Helena to comfort “my mother, your mistress” in
the play’s first scene. Parolles’ protestations against this language only
serve to increase Lafew’s ire and push him towards more and more
aggressive assertions of Parolles’ servility. Parolles struggles to maintain
the pose of the elaborately mannered courtier that we have just seen
parodied by the Clown: “My lord, you do me most insupportable vexa-
tion.” With Lafew gone, Parolles reacts with intense revulsion against
the “scurvy, old, filthy, scurvy lord!” He swings comically between an
outraged determination to cleanse himself of Lafew’s insinuations, to
“take this disgrace off me,” and pragmatic calculation of his chances:
“I’ll beat him, by my life, if I can meet him with any convenience, and
he were double and double a lord” (2.3.237–9). At this declaration, of
course, Lafew re-enters and burdens Parolles with more assertions of his
servitude by telling him that Helena and Bertram have been married:
“Your lord and master’s married. … You have a new mistress.” Parolles’
attempt to disavow the status of servant (“He is my good lord; whom
I serve above is my master”), only further enrages Lafew, who launches
into this diatribe:
Why dost thou garter up thy arms a’ this fashion? Dost make hose
of thy sleeves? Do other servants so? Thou wert best set thy lower
part where thy nose stands. By mine honour, if I were but two hours
younger I’d beat thee. Methink’st thou art a general offence and
every man should beat thee. I think thou wast created for men to
breathe themselves upon thee. … You were beaten in Italy for picking
a kernel out of a pomegranate. (2.3.249–58)
The second act witnesses Parolles’ gradual transformation into “Fortune’s

close-stool.” After his humiliation at Lafew’s hands, he attempts to
take on the role of dignified courtier with Helena and the Clown;
but the Clown torments him just as Lafew did by mocking him as
mastered “man.” Parolles borrows Lafew’s tactics in response by claiming
“I have found thee,” but the Clown responds that “much fool may you
find in you, even to the world’s pleasure and the increase of laughter”
(2.4.35–7). To “know” or “find” someone again symbolizes mastery
and ownership of that person, and Parolles “finds” no one; instead, he
himself is found and known by “the world.” As he complains to Lafew,
“O my good lord, you were the first that found me” (5.2.42–3). Like
Lafew, the Clown imagines Parolles as the universal object of knowledge;
however, this image is not of violent mastery but of laughter. Both
Lafew and the Clown anticipate Parolles’ public shaming at the hands
of the French lords in Act 4.
While threats of public exposure for Helena remain at the level
of Lafew’s lascivious public commentary, the Clown’s antifeminist
ballad making, and the rumors that Parolles spreads about her, Parolles
is “crush’d with a plot” in a climactic scene of public shaming.66 At
Helena’s presentation at court Lafew provided bawdy commentary as
stand-in for the public, and in the scenes of Parolles’ exposure Bertram
and other lords are positioned as observers who make satirical remarks
about him. Both scenes ritualize the public exposure of their subjects.
Bertram resolves that “He shall be whipp’d through the army, with
this rhyme in’s forehead.” The “First Lord” demands a copy of this
mocking rhyme, presumably a ballad, and lords and soldiers disperse
to spread word of Parolles’ fall. His shame is equivalent to a woman’s
sexual fall, as one soldier remarks: “If you could find out a country
where but women were that had receiv’d so much shame you might
begin an impudent nation. Fare ye well, sir, I am for France too. We
shall speak of you there” (4.3.326–9). Bertram repeatedly calls Parolles
a “cat,” a term of contempt used for prostitutes and for a person will-
ing to switch sides and to betray friends.67 In the play’s final moments,
Parolles has given up his ambition to make his name through soldier-
ing, and accepts service in the household of his enemy Lafew, who
casually recruits him: “Good Tom Drum … wait on me home, I’ll make
sport with thee” (5.3.20–23). Now reconciled to being kept “tame,” as

Lafew has described it, Parolles accepts the humiliations of service in
exchange for security: “Rust sword, cool blushes, and, Parolles, live /
Safest in shame” (4.3.37–8).
In Helena’s and Parolles’ narrative arcs, Shakespeare envisions two
paths of servitude: one in which a servant proves her worth and becomes
a mistress, and one in which a servant pretends to greater gentility than
he possesses and is relegated to the role of household clown. In doing
so, he confronts us with the social ambiguity of the role of gentle
servant. The household orders explored in Chapter 3 stress the public
importance of these servants: their civility, attractive self-presentation,
and regard for fine distinctions of privacy demonstrate the worth and
status of the household master or mistress. In Shakespeare’s staging of
these servants’ own desires and ambitions, the potential injustices and
social fractures in this arrangement become more evident. Parolles’
withdrawal from the field of war to the household gives a new mean-
ing to the household privacy so treasured by lords and masters in their
household orders. But it also raises the question of whether, as “Tom
Drum,” he will find any release from punishing exposure in the highly
qualified privacy of the household. Generations of audiences have
wondered whether the play’s title accurately characterizes Helena’s
fate; as David Schalkwyk observes, Shakespeare “empowers the lowly
born woman to achieve the object of her desires, although whether she
overcomes those patriarchal obstinacies – whether all is indeed well that
ends well – is less certain.”68 We should be wondering as well whether
the title applies to the fate of Parolles, demoted from miles gloriosus to
household sport, and now “safest in shame.”
5
Marriage and Private Lament in
Mary Wroth’s Urania
In 1621, the bookstalls of London featured an unusual offering: The

Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, a romance that only thinly veiled
its autobiographical tales of illicit love. More startlingly, the title
page announced the author as “the right honorable the Lady Mary
Wroath, Daughter to the right Noble Robert Earle of Leicester, and
Neece to the ever famous, and renowned Sir Phillips Sidney knight.
And to the most exelent Lady Mary Countesse of Pembroke late
deceased.” Urania was not only unique as an English work of fiction by
a woman, it also trumpeted its author’s extraordinary social position
and family connections.1 Although Wroth claimed not to have intended
its publication, Urania’s exposure of its author could hardly have been
more daring, given the time’s biases against print publication, against
women reading – much less writing – romances, and against women
as extramarital lovers. The book met with anger and mockery, forcing
the author to apologize and withdraw it from circulation.2 Wroth’s
foray into print contrasts sharply with her heroines’ view of public
exposure: they hide the contents of their hearts and the products of
their pens. Queen Pamphilia, Urania’s most avid poet, is the “most
distressed, secret, and constant Lover,” who “never in all her extremest
sufferings” tells her story outright, but withdraws for self-communion
to a bower as “delicate without, as shee was faire, and darke within as
her sorrowes” (90–91). Wroth compares Pamphilia to her garden because
the beauty of both consists in privacy: a decorous exterior promises
wonders, while resolutely concealing them. Urania places immense
value on women’s resistance to publicity, but it insistently stages the
overcoming of such reluctance in scenes of eavesdropping that allow
the revelation of heroines’ secret desires, paralleling Wroth’s own
self-disclosure.
112
Marriage and Private Lament in Mary Wroth’s Urania 113
Jeff Masten and Nona Fienberg have both argued that Wroth discloses
a new stance of female authorship, making the “private self” a source
of authority in opposition to a Petrarchan tradition of publicly com-
petitive masculine authorship.3 Indeed, Wroth’s female poets, all
lamenters of lost love, locate authentic feeling and the right to speak in
the privileged space of retirement.4 Nevertheless, critics have begun to
re-evaluate Wroth’s conception of authorship, privileging her interest
in public discourses both within the fictional world of Urania and in
the text’s alliances with contemporary genres. Since Josephine Roberts’
initial exploration of Wroth’s far-ranging influences, Urania has emerged
as a work of remarkably creative intertextuality that engages with public
culture in diverse ways.5 Paul Salzman and Ann Rosalind Jones have
both portrayed Wroth as a commentator on court culture and contem-
porary politics, while Nona Fienberg has revised her earlier position,
finding in Wroth’s poetry “public markers” referring to the Jacobean
social world.6 Rosalind Smith has depicted Wroth as a patron of politi-
cally minded writers and has found in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, the
sonnet sequence appended to Urania, an oppositional stance towards
the Jacobean regime.7 The split in critical positions must be due in part
to Wroth’s own contradictory view of privacy and public exposure,
a conflict most evident in the eavesdropping scenes in which her
heroines’ private laments are overheard by a wondering audience.
I argue that in her use of overheard laments, Wroth explores the vola-
tile and shifting border between the private and the public; moreover,
she addresses the contradictions implicit in her culture’s construction
of the marital household.8
Wroth radically changed the themes permissible in Renaissance
romance. Her male predecessors in the genre of pastoral romance
marginalized women’s extramarital desire, celebrating passion in men
but chastity in women, and ridiculing the socially ostracized “fallen”
woman.9 She revived an idealization of adultery reminiscent of
Arthurian romance, using it to critique the social institution of marriage
and its effects on both husbands and wives. Such themes are foreign to
pastoral romance, but at home in a very different genre of Wroth’s era:
the narrative verse tradition of fallen women’s laments, such as those
of Jane Shore and Rosamond discussed in the previous chapter. Wroth
both deploys and critiques the overheard lament, adapting it for new
purposes as she satirizes the male tradition of eroticizing female laments.
As in fallen women’s laments, in Urania the autonomous privacy in
which women lament contrasts with social spaces that they do not
control – particularly the institutions of marriage and concubinage.
Tracing Wroth’s alliances with several key genres reveals her

search for new ways to imagine women’s relation to marriage.10 Like
Arthurian romance, Urania glorifies adulterous love as an escape from
the social constrictions of marriage. However, in investigating the
effects of marriage on wives and husbands, Wroth moves beyond
both the sentimental tragedy of fallen women’s laments and the
utopian aura of adultery in earlier romance. Here, we find a complex
depiction of women’s sexuality and a disillusioned view of marriage
similar to that of fallen women’s laments; but Wroth’s laments are set
in the magical landscape of romance. Annabel Patterson has argued
that seventeenth-century English romance came steadily closer to
embracing forthright topical allusion by mixing fact and fantasy,
commentaries on contemporary life and fabulous marvels.11 I hope
to clarify Mary Wroth’s role in this process by showing that her
analysis of domestic relations works as a kind of domestic allegory.12
She balances an idealistic view of love with a prescient realism in her
depiction of sexual exploitation and adultery. Her use of the lament,
a well-worn Renaissance genre, creates a rich and realistic social context
for women’s expressions of grief, contrasting the private spaces in
which desire is expressed with the oppressively public spaces of the
marital household.
In Urania, the convention of female lamenting that is given over to
escapist themes in pastoral romance instead reflects the problematic
household relations of Wroth’s own experience.13 Urania’s illicit lovers
repeatedly mirror Wroth’s biography and her illicit love affair; in treat-
ing extramarital love, she was, no doubt, rewriting earlier phases of
her own love for an inconstant partner, her cousin William Herbert,
third Earl of Pembroke (1580–1630). Wroth endured an arranged mar-
riage to a husband said to be jealous and churlish, and after his death
she bore two children to Herbert, who had several other affairs and
cut off Wroth’s children from inheritance.14 Gary Waller concludes
that “Urania is thus the enactment of a fantasy of resentment and
desire for something more fulfilling than her society has assigned
her as a woman.”15 Although Wroth’s idealized view of illicit love
seems to deserve Waller’s charge of wish fulfillment, such an account
neglects her complex and innovative intertextuality, reducing her use
of romantic motifs to mere escapism. She attends to the persuasive
power of familiar romance motifs to move audiences, while trans-
forming the earlier literary tradition’s representation of illicit love. In
Urania, illicit love, like poetry, can create a private refuge, a fantasy
space sheltering women from abusive exposure; but Wroth insistently
stages the violation of such spaces. The overheard lament itself creates
a dialectic between poetic privacy and the pleasure – for poet and
audience – of its transgression. In a sense, Wroth’s many lamenting
heroines are lamenting for her, and the Urania itself constitutes an
intentionally overheard lament. She sketches a model for the reception
of her complaint in the sympathy that Urania’s audiences yield to its
lamenting women.16
Women’s Privacy in Pastoral Romance and Fallen

Women’s Laments
Louis Montrose has remarked of Spenser’s “episodes of interrupted

intimacy” that “here the private is not merely defined by its juxta-
position to the public; it becomes apprehensible precisely in the
moment of its violation.”17 Scenes in which a woman’s poetic intro-
spection is interrupted by an eavesdropper became central in two of
Wroth’s most important influences, Jorge de Montemayor and Gil
Polo’s Diana (1559) and Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s
Arcadia (1590). Their predecessor, Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1489),
firmly links poetic expression to the interiority of the self. Sannazaro’s
lovelorn narrator, “knowing myself to have something else in my
breast that it did not behoove me to show outwardly,” titles himself
“Sincero” and runs off to the wilds, “fleeing the society of shepherds,
to be the better able to think upon my troubles in solitary places.”18
For “Sincero” and Sannazaro’s other poet/shepherds, poetic solitude
is merely a rhetorical theme; although they have much to say on
authentic feeling and its proper expression in solitude, they say it in
public, and often as part of a competitive exchange of verses. Later,
Montemayor devised an ingenious solution to this incongruity:
Diana’s plot advances through the overhearing of private laments. In
Diana, the overheard lament amounts to a new narrative technology
that radically alters plot structure as well as the thematics of privacy
and poetry.19
The typical scene of poetic exertion in Montemayor and Polo’s Diana
and Sidney’s Arcadia is not a festive competition as in Sannazaro’s
Arcadia, but invaded privacy. Moreover, while Sannazaro’s women are
silent love objects whose beauty inspires poets’ praises, in Diana women
emerge as powerful creators of poetry, whose modesty imbues poetry
with a unique authenticity when their laments are overheard. The
first overheard lament occurs when Sylvanus and Syrenus discuss the
beauty of Diana, Syrenus’s beloved. Sylvanus remarks that she might
have aroused “excessive desire” if a man less continent than himself

had witnessed her
sitting with thee neere to yon little brooke, when she was kembing
her golden haire, and thou holding the glasse unto her … though
neither of you both did (perhaps) know that I espied you from those
high bushes, neere to the two great okes, keeping (yet) in mind the
verses, that thou sungest upon the holding of the glasse.20
The “excessive” erotic charge in this story derives from Sylvanus’s

violation of several layers of, or figures for, privacy. He perceives Diana’s
beauty as that which is contemplated first by herself in the mirror,
and next by her lover, Syrenus, who observes her observing herself.
Montemayor portrays Sylvanus as an avidly voyeuristic consumer of
Syrenus’s verses through his intrusion on the lovers’ privacy. The epi-
sode dwells at length on Sylvanus’s minutely described hiding place
and his laborious memorization of Syrenus’s poem; intrusion seems to
have raised the value of both the verses and Diana’s beauty. The scene
of eavesdropping thus transfers the question of poetic value from the
poet’s attainment of certain rhetorical standards to the conditions of
poetic reception. The poem overheard at the cost of overcoming layers
of intimacy – or the poem that suggests such a forced revelation – gains
credibility and allure.
In this scene, the triangular relation between woman, poet/lover, and
voyeur lends poetry a seductive aura of violated privacy.21 However,
eavesdropping on a solitary woman lost in the throes of love melan-
choly provides a richer opportunity for voyeuristic pleasure, and a
more enticing analogue for poetic performance and reception. When
the shepherd band accidentally intrudes on Belisa in bed, Montemayor
describes at length her carelessly displayed body and manifest despair
(108–09). The nymphs and shepherds are “so amazed at her beautie,
and at her inward sorrow” that they shed sympathetic tears. Even
though Belisa is not reciting verses here, the display of private sorrow
that is both pitiful and seductive will emerge as a key theme in the
portrayal of poets. Sidney imitates the Belisa incident when Pyrocles
enters Philoclea’s bedroom, where she is meticulously described in a
seductive posture of despair – like Belisa, she lies on her bed in a trans-
lucent smock, one leg left bare. Sidney, however, allows Pyrocles to
overhear Philoclea uttering two elaborately innovative sonnets, “with
some art curiously written to enwrap her secret and resolute woes.”22
Philoclea’s artful poems are like her “fair smock wrought all in flames
of ash-colour silk and gold,” which “enwraps” her body’s beauty while
exposing it to the eager observer. The poems beautify her sorrow not
only by giving it a splendid setting, but also by partially obscuring,
and therefore highlighting, the nakedness of emotion. Eavesdropping
resolves the conflict between authenticity and art, since the solitary
lament appears unquestionably real. The juxtapositions of display and
secrecy, simplicity and artifice, and publicity and privacy characterize,
in scenes of female lament, the seductiveness of poetry itself.23
Female lamenters thus became a locus of reflection on authorship
and privacy, a special case of the conflict between interior affect and its
poetic expression. This status is enabled by women’s roles as objects of
visual pleasure and their accompanying duty of modesty, which Sidney
calls “that tiresome familiar of womankind” (185). In Belisa’s and
Philoclea’s scenes, the sense of intrusion is intensified by the interrupted
lamenter’s shame at her exposure – even if she has only displayed her
woe.24 This feminine claim to special authorial status through modesty
persists in seventeenth-century women’s writing, becoming an explicit
argument in defense of women writing on amatory subjects. Madeleine
de Scudéry has her heroine Plotina assert women’s superiority in writing
“exquisite” love letters: “For a woman, in regard she never absolutely
acknowledges her love, but doth all things with a greater Mystery, this
Love, whereof there can only be a glympse, causes a greater pleasure
than that which is apparent, and without ceremony.”25 The “glympse”
of the “Mystery” of later seventeenth-century heroines’ love letters thus
replicates in a new form Sidney’s and Montemayor’s lonely lamenters
and their partly displayed, partly hidden beauty.
There is some potential for the ridiculous in all of this hiding and
exposing of bodies and poems, and Sidney gently satirizes Pyrocles’
(and presumably the reader’s) transport at the display of suffering
beauty. He notes that Philoclea introduces her sonnet with a “piti-
ful but sweet screech,” and that Pyrocles almost forgets that he has
come to her bedroom for higher felicities than eavesdropping (231). In
another eavesdropping scene, Sidney satirizes women’s laments, having
Cleophila/Pyrocles witness Gynecia’s private complaint – to the intrud-
er’s horror: “with a cold sweat all over her, as if she had been ready to
tread upon a deadly stinging adder, she would have withdrawn herself” –
but the lamenter catches her unwilling voyeur and pleads for love,
tearing her clothes to expose her body (183). In another parodic scene,
Musidorus comes upon Miso, a rustic servant, “babbling to herself,
and showing in all her gestures that she was loathsomely weary of the
world” (189). Miso is “sitting in the chimney’s end,” a debased version
of the aristocratic woman’s bedchamber as a setting for female privacy.

In his repeated mockery of such figures, Sidney draws a distinction
between his heroines’ authentic, admirable laments, and the repellent
laments of fallen women, who can only wish for the dignity of true
suffering.
Perhaps Sidney alludes to a generic distinction between the refined
laments of romance and the laments in popular ballads that my
Chapter 4 examines. Fallen heroines appeared not only in ballads,
but also in narrative verse written in a high tragic style addressed
to a gentry audience, such as Thomas Churchyard’s in the Mirror for
Magistrates, Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594), Michael Drayton’s
England’s Heroical Epistles (1597), and Thomas Middleton’s The Ghost of
Lucrece (1600). In Samuel Daniel’s The Complaint of Rosamond (1592),
Rosamond’s ghost, “attended with my shame that never sleepes,” is
exiled from eternal rest unless her tale of sexual exploitation can arouse
sympathy in living lovers.26 Like Churchyard’s Jane Shore, Rosamond is
portrayed as having risen from the grave to tell her story directly to the
audience, claiming to cast modesty aside in a bid for sympathy. These
dramas of modesty and confession bring to mind scenes of eavesdrop-
ping in pastoral romance; here, too, the issue of poetic reception places
opposing constructions on the female lamenter’s exposure to an audi-
ence. For these female characters, pride in authorship vies with shame
against a harshly realistic backdrop of sexual exploitation and social
injustice. Again, violated privacy is at stake, but it connotes the bitter
social consequences of extramarital sexuality, rather than the pleasure
of aestheticized transgression.
The fallen heroines speak of abuse by parents, husbands, and kings,
of sexual hypocrisy, and of shame, and their honesty and concern with
gender inequity create a powerful (although fictive) female autobio-
graphical voice. This voice serves to demonstrate the virtuosic versatility
of the male author, who writes himself into both Rosamond’s and Jane
Shore’s laments. Rosamond pleads with Daniel to turn from his own
distress (told in Sonnets to Delia) to publicize hers, and Jane Shore admits
that the glory of authoring her narrative will belong to Churchyard,
while the shame remains her own:
[Churchyard] shall not only haue the fame of his owne worke (which
no man can deny), but shall likewise haue all the glory I can gieue
him, if hee lend mee the hearing of my woefull tale, a matter scarce
fit for womans shamefastnes to bewray. But since without blush-
ing I haue so long beene a talkatiue wench, (whose words a world
hath delighted in) I will now goe on boldly with my audacious

manner: and so step I on the stage in my shrowdeing sheete as I was
buried.27
Jane Shore’s public exposure designates her a “talkatiue wench,” “bold,”

and “audacious,” while for Churchyard, who admits that he is also a
lover and lamenter, authorial fame signifies “glory.” Churchyard and
Shore seem to compete for the position of author: Shore’s words
delight the world, but she defers to Churchyard, a “writer of good
continuance,” who will include her tragic story with those of kings in
the Mirror for Magistrates.28 Churchyard emphasizes the immediacy of
the narration by representing Shore as speaker and himself as hearer;
she appears before him, then declares that she is stepping on “the stage”
to address us in her shroud. Churchyard’s hand in the work is an absent
one; he is quickly dismissed when Shore mounts the stage. The focus
on Shore’s body, her distinctive voice, and her presence make her the
source of unordered feeling, while the invisible Churchyard gets the
role of skilful poet, a detached framer of Shore’s passion. By thematiz-
ing the narrator’s shame, fallen women’s laments locate the reader as
witness to the unveiling of female privacy, a position also presented as
erotically transgressive – even though, as here, lamenters often directly
address their readers.
Visibility and Retreat in Urania’s Overheard Laments
Wroth’s overheard laments break decisively with the traditions of

pastoral romance; she innovatively employs popular verse, chivalric
romance, and Arthurian legends to give women’s privacy new contexts
and inflections. In a lengthy episode in which Philarchos is tempted
to commit adultery, Wroth spoofs the seductive modesty of the female
lamenter made conventional by Sidney and Montemayor.29 Here,
Wroth rewrites the scene of erotic eavesdropping so that the focus falls
less on the erotic spectacle of invaded female privacy than on the male
eavesdropper’s conflicted feelings about the conjugal household. The
episode enacts both a skeptical take on the concerns of her predecessors
and a turn to Wroth’s central interest in husbands’ and wives’ disparate
experience of marriage.
By highlighting the conflict between marriage and desire, Wroth
makes Philarchos’ own possible sexual dishonor as central to the scene
as that of the lamenting lady.30 Philarchos defines romantic narrative
in opposition to the conjugal household, where no adventures worth
the telling could transpire.31 Pressed to tell Pamphilia, Veralinda, and

the Queen of Naples of his recent activities, he notes that “To relate
houshould affaires ore businesses of that kinde [as] home-bred matters
wowld bee unfitting such excellent eares”; therefore, he tells of adul-
tery’s temptations.32 According to his tale, Philarchos left “quiett rests
att home” to search for the lost infants. At the court of Licia, “a paradise
of earthly contents,” the royal host and his beautiful daughter ply him
with food, music, and elaborate compliments until he is “truly ravished
with itt.” Later, roused from bed by singing, Philarchos views through
a window the climax of the court’s beauties: not the princess and her
bevy of “delicate ladys” but the arbor in which they sit, in the center of
which stands a fountain topped by, “as if a vaile,”
a blushing rose, an innosent Jessimine, and an ambitious-in-loving

woodbine; ever climing to the top to showe his loved service, aspired
to showe itt self most aparante, spreading in kissing the fruict. And
as affectionate to thos kisses, amourously twining and imbracing,
the branches which ther had like twining and yeelding, gentle sprigs
imbraced and lovingly Joined in beeing twinn-like twines, and as
sweetly inclosing them as amourousest thoughts doth the harts of
most amourous lovers. … This made me thinke and remember the
time when I had binn a lover. (2.123)
The conjunction of water and “amorous” plants – the attributes of

a conventional locus amoenus – often characterizes Wroth’s lament
settings. As a symbol of temptation, the bower is reminiscent of the
entrance to Spenser’s Bower of Bliss, adorned with vines of “wanton
wreathings intricate” (2.12.53).33 However, Philarchos has no intention
of maintaining a Guyon-like resistance, and he glories in the court’s
seductive atmosphere and the delights that “sincke into his sence,” in
Spenser’s terms (2.12.54). His memories of past love evoke a present
desire for “liberty” and a wish for “variety” “instead of teadiousnes
to one course” (2.123). Having fled the marital household, Philarchos
finds its supposed antithesis – in yet another domestic scene. One scene
represents feminized domesticity as a dulling form of repression; the
other, as a blissful idyll.
Wroth leads her readers slowly into amused recognition of the contra-
dictoriness – and futility – of Philarchos’ desire for “liberty.” In a state
of heightened amorous awareness, Philarchos walks into a bedchamber
where a woman happens to be passionately lamenting her love for him.
The sight arouses conflicting emotions: fear that “[he] might heere be
wrought to the full height of libertie,” and delight in his marvelous

luck. Wroth’s interest in the eavesdropper’s internal state contrasts with
Montemayor and Sidney’s strategy of displaying the female lamenter as
an object of voyeuristic pleasure. They invite the reader to participate
in the scene through the voyeur’s eyes, an illusion that Sidney breaks
only by a brief impulse to ridicule. Wroth, however, introduces a new
distance between reader and voyeur. Philarchos’ eavesdropping scene
replaces the spectacle of female display with a critique, at multiple
levels, of the male voyeur’s pleasure. Philarchos tells this tale at his
own expense; he describes his sensations with some self-mockery,
emphasizing contradictory emotions and his ingenuity in justifying
inconstancy. His female audience, moreover, interrupts him with ironic
and critical comments: Veralinda is amused by Philarchos’ seeming a
“dreadful man” to the surprised lady; Pamphilia sardonically undercuts
his assertions about the lady’s motives. Wroth fully exploits the scene’s
erotic potential while also exposing the logic of that eroticism and the
pretenses on which it depends.
Thus the scene confronts the eroticization of poetry in the over-
heard laments of Wroth’s predecessors. The themes of modesty and
desire animating that eroticism are evident in the description of the
bower that climaxes the court’s seductive effect on Philarchos. The
flowers represent love through opposing metaphors: on the one hand,
self-advancement; on the other, modesty. The “ambitious-in-loving”
woodbine, which “aspired” to “show itself most apparent,” twines with
the “blushing rose and innosent Jessamine” – the modest flowers yield,
the ambitious embrace. Such a play between desire and modesty char-
acterizes Philarchos’ dalliance with the lady: “I tooke many most sweet
and pleasing kisses from her, which she, loath to lett me have, made
them farr the sweeter, striving soe pretily as the more pleasingly to
make mee take more that she might have more cause to refuse” (2.126).
The lady’s pretense of resistance heightens the enjoyment of both
partners, and Philarchos pretends not to see through her deception in
order to preserve the transgressive nature of their caresses. This delight
in resistance extends to potential violence: “I throwing myself on the
bed, then holding her by the trembling hand, her voice then weake with
feare of furder danger” (2.127). Here, Philarchos implies that the lady’s
fear was unfeigned, but he has provided ample grounds for skepticism
by portraying her modesty as a highly effective seductive ploy.
This scene’s delightful transgression is marred for Philarchos by his
consciousness that it is artificial. On first overhearing the lady, he was
troubled by no such compunctions, and even while observing with
pleasure her repression of her passion, he seems to have encountered

the perfect “liberty” that he desired: “I had all paines taken away,
all traveiles prevented; a most rich and intising place, and a lady soe
delitious .…” (2.125). However, Philarchos enjoys the exercise of his will –
as revealed in his threatening pose above – and seems to have found an
utter lack of “paines” and “traveiles” somewhat troubling. He describes
repeatedly asking himself whether “I had better pleased the sweet, sad
soule with kinde and loving imbracings then as I did [by restraint]”
(2.126). His enjoyment ceased when he convinced the lady to tell her
story. Her words of love addressed directly to him left him cold, and
he accused her of insincerity: “onely words will prove your troubles,
nott infelt sorrow, since deepest and most true-felt griefe is manifested
in deepest and consealingest silence” (2.128). He followed this rebuke
with a tirade on the purity of marriage vows, and sent his “lady soe deli-
tious” home to her father. This tonal shift divests his harangue of moral
authority, and suggests that the lady ruined his pleasure by depriving
him of the role of voyeur. Wroth offers her readers ample evidence that
Philarchos’ outrage was hypocritical, and the narrative’s multiple layers
of calculation deny both the lovestruck lamenter and Philarchos any
claim to sincerity. In the context of her predecessors’ use of overheard
laments to support poetry’s claims to authentic expressiveness and
seductive power, Wroth’s puncturing of illusion amounts to an implicit
satire on such conventions. She provides an understated critique of the
erotics of authorship that such scenes construct, including the analogy
between the woman’s body and words, the theme of poetry’s affective
power, and its location in privileged spaces of aristocratic privacy.
Indeed, Wroth turns the scene from authentic feelings to conflicted
ones, from poetic seduction to “home-bred matters”: marriage versus
“liberty.” Her exploration of fetishized privacy confronts the reader
with Philarchos’ marital duty and his wish to evade it, while mocking
the self-delusion necessary for him to indulge his desires. Her scene’s
import lies in the experience of marriage as a restriction on “liberty,”
and the conflicting desires of a husband who is also, anomalously,
a knight errant. In fact, every husband happily married at the close of
Urania’s First Part is tempted by “liberty” in the beginning of the Second
Part, with the exception of Parselius, who has already surrendered to
inconstancy. In Urania, the private spaces of female lamenters not only
suggest pleasure and eroticism; they reflect on the marital households
that attempt – and often fail – to enclose them.
Although Philarchos’ temptation is the most self-reflective of such
episodes in Urania, Wroth often incorporates overheard laments into
inset narratives, leading to a great expansion of the themes that we

have already encountered. As this episode places the private space of
lament and illicit love in uncomfortable opposition to the public and
rather drab space of marriage, Wroth’s more straightforward uses of the
overheard lament repeatedly highlight women’s private and public roles
and desires. The pleasurable space of the overheard lament is much
like the motif of the bower in Spenser, as Patricia Parker has described
it. Spenser’s bowers represent potentially dangerous indolence, but
can also suggest a nurturing retreat for the self from society and activ-
ity.34 Likewise, the natural beauty of the loca amoena in which Wroth’s
laments occur has a defensive edge, indicating a temporary respite from
the scrutiny of the marital household.
In Urania, questing knights typically encounter a beautiful lady
lamenting lost love in a delightful natural setting. Amphilanthus and
Ollorandus ride by a “faire and pleasant rivers side” where willows grow
in the familiar amorously twining pattern: “the water in love with their
rootes, chastly embraced them, making pretty fine ponds betweene each
other, the armes, and bodyes of the trees, lying so kindly to each other”
(1.288). On a “kind of bed” of these boughs, the Lady Angler reclines
“as if fishing, but her mind plac’d on a higher pleasure … as she sate,
she would make pretty, and neate comparisons, betweene her betraying
the poore sily fish, and her owne being betrayed by the craft of love”
(1.288). Her exemplification of the type of the lamenting lady extends
to the play on clothing and nakedness, for her gown and sleeves are
“buttoned to the bottom … but by reason the weather was warme, they
were left open in spaces, through which her cut-worke Smock appeared,
and here and there, her delicate skin was seene” (1.289).
While in its eroticizing of compromised modesty this episode at first
appears conventional, Wroth stresses that this private liaison is carried
out in a space of public exposure: an aristocratic household. The Lady
Angler is no Belisa or Pyroclea, and is not consumed by blushes when
her love complaint is overheard. In fact, her song is a plea – a demand,
even – for exposure:
Love peruse me, seeke, and finde

How each corner of my minde
is a twine
woven to shine.
She asks that her “Deare” “desect me, sinewes, vaines … / When
you thus anotamise / All my body, my heart prise” (1.288–9).
When Amphilanthus and Ollorandus accompany the Lady Angler to

her husband’s home, they observe her pursuing a love affair in full
view of admiring onlookers. The household ordinances that I discuss in
Chapter 3 demonstrate that noble heads of households expected con-
stant attendance as a mark of honor, and the Lady Angler’s household
mirrors this expectation. Here, the locus amoenus stages the female poet’s
desire to reveal herself, rather than displaying her modesty; meanwhile,
the household that is imagined elsewhere as so restrictive appears as a
haven for idealized extramarital love. The Lady Angler’s freedom does
not result from a lack of surveillance, since she is “much honoured, and
beloved of all.” She has drawn to her husband’s castle many knights,
who are witnesses to the lovers’ bliss, for “never did any woman make
such free, yet modest shew of love as she did” (295). The Lady Angler
and her lover, Laurimello, display their affection through amorous
glances and signs of favor, “affection discovered at the height, and as
true love would wish, freely given and taken” (295). Since with every
glance their affection is “discovered,” the lovers’ intimacy constitutes a
performance of privacy, a supposedly private space that the audience in
her husband’s household repeatedly transgress. Nevertheless, because
the discovery of love is continually repeated, their tie retains the eroti-
cism of privacy as well as the liberty to eschew secrecy. The Lady Angler
has redefined the space of the household: in spite of her husband’s con-
stant presence, it is a stage on which she acts out virtuous passion for an
amazed audience. Bystanders applaud her liaison, while Amphilanthus
wonders whether he too may “live to see such good” with Pamphilia
(1.295). Over time, the Lady Angler narrates, her husband has come
to believe that her openness indicates chastity. Here, public visibility
represents freedom from a husband’s dominion, even though the affair
takes place right under her husband’s nose.
The Lady Angler’s lament rejects eroticized privacy in favor of trium-
phant publicity. Urania’s other lamenters also seek supportive audiences
for their illicit love affairs; but such positive public contexts are
transitory. Most often, Wroth’s lamenters are driven by public humiliation
to seek isolated places, and the private locus amoenus of lament indicates
exile.35 Pastora, for example, seeks a respite from punishing exposure
on a literal island, a “Rocke” in the sea that underscores the privacy of
her lament.36 The pleasure with which Wroth describes Pastora’s self-
sufficiency makes of her a kind of early Crusoe figure: she has a small,
leaden-roofed house from which she views the sea, accompanied by two
maids and a herd of goats that serve as audience to her love complaints.
When Steriamus discovers this beautiful shepherdess on her rock,
we seem to have encountered merely a new variation on the locus

amoenus. However, the full significance of Pastora’s little island becomes
clearer when she describes her past. Like the Lady Angler, Pastora
was unhappily married and carried out an extramarital affair before a
sympathetic public: “Their loue (for what loue can be kept secret where
such barres bee for enioying) was seene and spoken of by many, yet
few blam’d them, but wish’d they were free” (1.416).37 When her lover
abandons and scorns her, public attention becomes the keynote of her
torment: “What could be lost she parted from, content, quiet, honor,
rest, reputation, fortunes to succeed.” While Wroth begins the tale with
Pastora’s publicly admired liaison, exposure becomes tragic when, now
named Silvarina, she loses the struggle against detractors. The Pastora/
Silvarina plot enacts the failure of visions of idyllic exposure; Wroth
cannot sustain happy extramarital narratives for long, and as Urania
proceeds, illicit love comes to connote furtiveness or even exclusion
from the household and disgrace.
Pastora/Silvarina thus vows to live and die on “the Rocke as hard as
her fortune, and as white as her faith” (1.421). The change from magi-
cal bower to rock reflects Wroth’s developing concern with the harsh
consequences of illicit love rather than its romantic idealization. As a
setting for private lament, the lush locus amoenus, in which the very
trees seem to make love, is replaced by a version of “hard pastoral,” a
barren rock that Pastora/Silvarina has made into a private retreat. Even
though it is pastoral, the rock is not a magical-romantic space opposed
to the tedium of marriage and household, but a fantasy household
much less public than those that Wroth and her aristocratic characters
knew. The fact that she imagines a place where privacy is possible in
such hyperbolic terms – as a rock in the midst of the sea – suggests
that existence in the “normal” household is characterized by relentless
visibility.
Although lamenters appear to seek refuge in privacy, the lament inev-
itably brings an audience. Pastora sits atop her rock like a mermaid, and
a glimpse of her combing her hair and singing draws Steriamus across
the sea to note that her beauty is “fit to be beloved and pittied, that it
was no more cherished” (1.415). Contradictorily, the refugee fleeing
exposure deserves, and gains, a pitying audience. Wroth’s representa-
tion of such attention can be highly conflicted, as in her depiction of
Dorolina, a “wretched forlorne soul” whose lament makes her into a
symbol of grief: “she one while cryed, another chafed, smil’d, scratch’d
her head, stamp’d, rail’d, and all at Love” (1.490). Dorolina haunts
a delightful lovers’ grove, but in her excessive displays of feeling she
becomes the sort of fountain that one might find in a locus amoenus: she
“seem’d like a mooving, or stirring water-worke: she turn’d to them,
and from them againe, shee cryd, and groan’d, then scornfully seem’d
to defie passion, and with a faint forged countenance would have
appeared sociable” (1.491). By so vigorously inhabiting the role of
lamenter, Dorolina becomes part of the frame rather than a subject; she
is a device depicting love as much as a lover.38 Here, Wroth reduces the
private space of lament to a public sign indicating love, which draws an
audience – one of lovers who have known similar losses, and who draw
out Dorolina’s tale with eager sympathy.
As we have seen, Wroth’s overheard laments move beyond the theme
of privacy’s violation to depict “private” realms in which positive expo-
sure is possible. The space of private lament can encompass crowds,
yet still retain the signifiers of removal and refuge. The shared privacy
of such a space consists in its liberty from conventional laws regulating
feminine modesty and shame. While walking alone in a pleasant copse,
the young princess Perselina happens on a “delicate, but distressed crea-
ture, in habits of a Pilgrime,” lamenting in verse her long “Pilgrimage
for Love” and expecting to “travell till I die.” Perselina invites her into
a “thicke,” and the two women walk apart from their servants into “the
thickest part, as close as their sufferings were to themselves,” where the
pilgrim Pelarina resists revealing “that secret, which must be known”
(1.528). At first, Pelarina’s resistance appears to replicate the fetishized
modesty of conventional female lamenters; but her protests against self-
revelation are speedily undercut by Perselina, who remarks that she has
already deduced Pelarina’s story from her “excellent speech, and man-
ner.” Perselina is also a lover, and the parallels between the two women’s
names and probable fates reinforce the sense of intimacy provided by
their mutual retreat. Like previous lamenters, Pelarina lived to regret
the glory that she once took in public acknowledgment of her love
when she “discern’d my losse publikely noted” (1.532). To Perselina,
however, she can admit that she had sex with her lover: “I granted what
I may lawfully repent … he but asked, and I yeelded, yet this I repent
not” (533). The “thicke” in the forest creates a private space for shared
suffering, revaluing the role of the openly desiring woman.39
Nevertheless, the space of lament is only a temporary haven for
Wroth’s many exiled illicit lovers. The motif of the exiled lamenter
imitates the rhetoric of abandoned speakers such as Jane Shore and
Rosamond Clifford, ghosts denied both life and rest. Exile and exposure
are parallel means of portraying illicit love as a loss of secure social
position – one at first voluntary, as a woman seeks to evade spousal or
parental control, and then forced, as she suffers public judgment, loses
support networks, and is cast out of both privacy and the household
at once. The trope of honesty, the depiction of women’s abuse and
exploitation by powerful men, and the topic of social falls create a
social realism in abandoned women’s laments that exists in few other
Renaissance literary forms. Laments present the common problems of
women as the result not of individual guilt, but of unjust institutions –
concubinage and arranged marriage. In this respect, Wroth’s heroines
mirror the Jane Shores and Rosamonds of narrative verse.
Illicit Love and the Public Household
Wroth retains the magical aura of privacy that infuses earlier overheard
laments; in her more romantic narratives, wives create a haven from
household scrutiny through extramarital love. However, her repre-
sentation of women in the household is extraordinarily complex and
shifting: in some tales illicit love is not private but highly visible, while
in others the erotic fascination of privacy is replaced by a tragic fate,
social exile. The constant theme is the harshness of household social
space: whether wives hide or are exposed in it, flee or are exiled from
it, the household is inhospitable and unaccommodating. Perhaps this
conclusion offers little surprise to those acquainted with the antifemi-
nist bent of early modern marriage advice manuals. We might expect
Wroth to show women estranged from the household or rejecting it,
but we also find husbands repelled by it. The households of Urania and
the private spaces of lament with which they are juxtaposed sketch out
a perspectival understanding of marriage. Each sex views the household
as the other’s realm, and each is in constant search of a private space
that will fulfill the desires that the household promised, but failed,
to satisfy.
Remarkably, Wroth’s depiction of love and marriage in Urania both
idealizes adultery and realistically depicts her own period’s rigorous
social retribution against illicitly loving women. Her realism focuses
on the negative social consequences of love and sexual consummation,
depicting women’s falls as products of institutional injustices rather
than providential or moral failures. In such moments, she shows that
personal tragedy has systemic causes in the social order. Renaissance
readers must have been accustomed to a different style in contemporary
pastoral romance, where fallible, and often amusing, lovers are saved
from their worst missteps, finally marrying or leading safely escapist
lives as shepherds. Wroth redefines romance: her lovers are larger than
life, like the heroic adulterers of Arthurian legend, but they encounter
realistic fates.
Despite animadversions from all quarters against its supposedly low
moral and aesthetic standards, chivalric romance on the Arthurian
model remained popular in England through the 1630s.40 Amadis of
Gaul and his brother Galaor, King Arthur, Lancelot, Tristan, Cligès,
and many other chivalric heroes enjoyed stolen hours of extramari-
tal love with the ladies they rescued.41 Generally, while Renaissance
pastoral romance valorized the overcoming of sexual temptation,
earlier chivalric romance delighted in surmounting obstacles to sexual
congress, such as husbands and fathers. Writers of pastoral romance
usually limited love plots to more escapist themes and resolutions.
Although pastoral heroines are abandoned or star-crossed lovers, con-
siderations of sexual experience, illicit love, and social consequences
do not enter into heroines’ love affairs in Sannazaro, Montemayor,
Polo, or d’Urfé. In keeping with his interest in the much more explicit
Amadis of Gaul, Sidney has Musidorus attempt to rape Pamela, while
Pyrocles’ eavesdropping on Philoclea in bed ends in his joining her
there to attain “due bliss.” However, these sexual scenes were excised
in the composite editions of 1593 and later; in any case, they close the
courtship stage of anticipation and uncertainty during which Sidney’s
lovers produce their poetic complaints. While the many lovers’
laments in these pastoral romances address a variety of catastrophes –
changes of affection, parental opposition, death, status difference, and
misunderstandings – they avoid directly representing consummation
and its consequences.
Likewise, marriage poses a significant difficulty for pastoral romance.
The plot of Montemayor’s Diana is predicated on the shepherdess
Diana’s marriage to the brutish Delius, which drives her lover Syrenus to
despair. Diana is our heroine, the marriage was forced, and Syrenus is
obviously superior to Delius, so the reader must wonder whether Diana
and Syrenus will form an extramarital liaison. Adding to the suspense,
Montemayor eventually disposes of Delius in a freak accident, free-
ing Diana to marry. All the while, the prospect of extramarital love is
implicit, as Diana and Syrenus wander the countryside lamenting their
lost happiness; but they remain separate at the end of Diana Enamoured.
Neither Montemayor nor Polo seems to be able to resolve Diana’s plot
satisfactorily; the other lovers’ sagas end with marriage, but her previ-
ous union seems to have condemned her to celibacy. Perhaps a widow’s
marriage among those of maids and nymphs would have seemed
anomalous – the stuff of comedy, not romance.
Sidney does represent marriage and extramarital love in the love

quadrangle that requires both Philoclea’s mother and father to fall in
love with Pyrocles-as-Cleophila. As in Diana, the husband’s extramari-
tal attraction is merely ridiculous, and Basilius’ hopeless courtship of
the Amazon, like Delius’ idiotic pursuit of Alcida, occasions no serious
reflections on the subject of fidelity. Sidney also makes the passion-
ate queen, Gynecia, the object of satire; but she is altogether a more
complex and intelligent character than her husband, and fully recog-
nizes the moral quandary in her attraction to Pyrocles. In repeatedly
unsuccessful attempts to overcome shame, Gynecia devises strategies
of self-justification that are both amusing and sympathetic. Sidney
depicts her attempts on Pyrocles as one-sided battles between virtue
and undeniable, all-mastering desire.42 But Gynecia is saved from
desire’s consequences by her husband’s death, for when he miraculously
revives, she has experienced a change of heart. This typically romantic
resolution allows Sidney to maintain a delicate balance between satire
and escapism.
Mary Wroth’s insistence on constancy in love as the ultimate virtue has
neoplatonic overtones and, like Sidney, she generally avoids asserting
outright that her heroines consummate their lifelong passions outside
of marriage. However, Wroth’s idealization of adulterous love reflects
the fascination exerted by lovers such as Lancelot and Guenevere, and
Tristan and Isolde. Her lovers face many of the obstacles that Arthurian
knights and ladies encountered: like Tristan, Amphilanthus continually
neglects his beloved to woo or marry other women, and like Tristan,
Lancelot, and Yvain, he succumbs to madness when his attempts to
reunite with his beloved are frustrated. Many wives in Urania must
bear the attention of vain, cowardly husbands, like Isolde’s King Mark,
whom Tristan regularly humiliates in Sir Thomas Malory. For Isolde,
as for many of Wroth’s wives, a degrading marriage to an unworthy
man throws illicit love into heroic relief: Malory has Isolde send to
Guenevere the triumphant message that “ther be withyn this land but
four lovers, that is Sire Lancelot du Lake and Quene Guenever, and Sire
Trystram de Lyonas and Quene Isoud.”43 In Wroth, as in chivalric romance,
love is more elevated, more heroic, when it is barred by marriage ties.
The literary tradition of the duped husband underlies the Tristan–
Isolde–King Mark triangle, and informs many of Wroth’s comical
depictions of unworthy husbands. Yet for Wroth, the love triangle
provides an opportunity to reflect on wives’ experience of marriage in
a way far more complex than was possible in earlier romance. We have
seen that Wroth’s overheard laments often inscribe a private space that
may be a refuge from marriage or the household. In Urania’s first book,

she similarly represents illicit love affairs themselves as “private spaces”
within a hostile household in which the wife finds herself a stranger.
The male lover represents escape from husbandly domination; his
existence creates a figurative private space “owned” by the wife within
or without a household from which she is alienated. Such a female
proprietary space modifies the early modern motif of a wife as a jewel
kept safe within her husband’s keeping by depicting the husband as
unworthy and his domain as dystopic; the separate realm of illicit love
provides a more appropriate setting for the virtuous woman.44 However,
such private spaces are contingent and highly unstable – doomed either
by the logic of household supervision, or by the social victimization of
female adulterers.
Urania’s first lamenting lover, Perissus, describes his beloved Limena’s
marriage to Philargus as “her Delicacy kept like a Diamond in a rotten
box” (1.8). Philargus’ torture of Limena draws on the spectacular image
of female imprisonment in Spenser’s House of Busirane (Faerie Queene
3.11); but Wroth explicitly applies the notion of a house of male tor-
ment to marriage.45 Philargus first imposes his will on Limena through
his lordship of the household: he manufactures excuses to dismiss her
servants and place his own in her service. The house is also a metaphor
for marriage’s restrictions: “Limena” stands on the threshold between
her husband’s control and the temporary freedom represented by extra-
marital love. The presence of her lover Perissus shows “that Philargus[’]
house is not in all places” (1.10).
In two early stories – on the illicit lovers of Cephalonia, and Ollorandus
and Melasinda – wives and their lovers meet in a locus amoenus that
reflects and intensifies the pleasurable secrecy of their liaison. Like the
private spaces of women’s laments, the delight of these illicit spaces
highlights the scrutiny and tyranny that Wroth’s characters experience
in the marital household.46 The lovers of Cephalonia escape during the
unwilling bride’s wedding feast and are “laid within a delicate Vineyard,
a place able to hide them, and plese them with as much content, as
Paris felt, when hee had deceiv’d the Greeke King of his beautifull
Helen” (1.42). Ollorandus and Melasinda’s tale offers a surprising
vision of adultery that enhances the Paris figure’s audacity. Ollorandus
persuades Melasinda to wed another man for political reasons: “With
much adoe, and long perswasions I wonne (her love to mee) her yield-
ing for the other,” he relates, even leading her to the bridal chamber.
The next morning “shee came downe into a little Garden, whereinto
no window looked, but that in her Cabinet, nor key could open but
her owne … Thus was I the blest man, injoying the world of riches in
her love, and hee contented after, having what he sought” (1.80). More
privileged than Paris, Ollorandus plays both the sponsor of the marriage
and its gloating violator. The garden, a locus amoenus in the middle of
the house that can only be reached or viewed through the lady’s private
chamber, demonstrates that the husband’s “house is not in all places.”47
Nevertheless, in this story the extent to which the wife has established
her own foothold is unclear: has the affair chiseled out a space for her,
or ceded it from her husband to her lover?
The troubles that Wroth herself, as well as other women, endured
under her class’s marriage system are magically elided in these early
episodes by faithful illicit love, which results in at worst a laudable
martyrdom; at best, eventual marriage for love. In these tales, Wroth’s
translation of experience gives to a fate laden with shame in fallen
women’s laments all the virtuous heroism available in both pastoral and
chivalric romance. Her heroines’ unhappiness with arranged marriages,
their abandonment by lovers, and their superhuman constancy create
heroic narratives out of the unfortunate conditions of Wroth’s life. Still,
marvelous and surprising contexts (the bride’s escape from her wed-
ding feast, Ollorandus’ arrangement of his lover’s marriage, Philargus’
extreme villainy, and Limena’s eleventh-hour escape from death) are
not the only mode in which Wroth addresses illicit love. Such striking
examples dominate the first two books of the First Part, and provide
analogues for Pamphilia and Amphilanthus’ liaison in the Second Part;
however, they are anomalous in the context of Urania as a whole. When
Wroth turns to wives as narrators in books three and four, she no longer
represents extramarital love as a secret escape from the household.
Her later female narrators construct a new kind of heroism not by
escaping the household, but by maneuvering within it. The Lady
Angler’s story idealizes the pursuit of illicit love on the model of
Lancelot and Guenevere or Tristan and Isolde, but, as one of Wroth’s
tales “more exactly related then a fixion,” it also depicts realistic social
obstacles to women’s desires.48 As a female poet, the Lady Angler is
linked to Wroth; like her, she loves her cousin and has intimate friend-
ships with his sister and mother, but marries another man before she
and her cousin acknowledge their mutual love. No knight errant will
arrive to save her from her husband, who himself is no villain, merely
unworthy: “as if hee were made for a punishment to her, for being so
excellently perfect above the common rate of her sex” (1.290). With
this husband, the Lady Angler leads a calm life, growing to be “good
friends, and like kind mates” (1.295). Her autobiography derives its
action from her early schemes to avoid marriage and encourage her
cousin Laurimello to propose, all without openly declaring herself.
Modesty silences her desire, for she knows that Laurimello “hated a
forward woman” (1.294). The lady, “having no meanes, save mine owne
industrie, and strenth of mind,” must overcome marital pressures by
oblique means, “busied like a Spider, which being to crosse from one
beame to another, must worke by waies, and goe farre about, making
more webs to catch her selfe into her owne purpose, then if she were
to goe an ordinary straight course” (1.293). The heroism of the tale is
all the woman’s, but it consists in cunning manipulation rather than
romantic suffering: she urges her father to decline one suitor based on
a fictional obligation to an earlier one, and fakes a proxy courtship to
facilitate meetings with Laurimello.
Wroth never abandons entirely the vision of idyllic illicit love that
she presents in Ollorandus and Melisinda, Perissus and Limena, the
Cephalonian lovers, and the Lady Angler and Laurimello; the work
culminates with the union of Urania’s central heroine, Pamphilia,
and her inconstant lover Amphilanthus, but only after each marries
another. Leutissia points out to Pamphilia that her adoring husband’s
blind obedience provides the perfect setting “co[nte]ntedly and chastely
to beeholde your deerest, safely and gloriously” (2.378); accordingly,
Amphilanthus and Pamphilia delight in each other’s company under
the approving eye of his sister Urania. In the context of the many social
falls that Wroth depicts, the ability to love illicitly both “safely and
gloriously” seems to be a property of Pamphilia’s exceptionalism: she is
a marvel of constancy and excels Urania’s other women in both virtue
and rank, for she is a queen in her own right. But even in Pamphilia’s
case, Wroth does not quite accept such a story, and she does not depict
the role of Rodomandro, Pamphilia’s husband, consistently. Although
Wroth has introduced him as a model of wisdom, valor, and chiv-
alry, after marriage Rodomandro becomes a repulsive wittold: when
Pamphilia’s brother dies he seeks to “Hold her in his arms, and buss
her, and call her his deer ducke, and intreat her to bear her brothers
loss patiently for his sake, yett if ther had nott binn a better comforter,
I doubt itt would of nessessitie have binn wurse with Pamphilia” (2.403).
On learning that Pamphilia has become a widow, we may well conclude
that Wroth has no intention of maintaining this lopsided love trian-
gle; yet her husband, the “great Chamm,” reappears on the next page
alive and traveling with the lovers in a cheerful threesome (2.406–07).
This unrevised trace of Wroth’s authorial quandary records a familiar
ambivalence about the fantasy of idyllic illicit love. The possibility
of merging the social restrictions of marriage with the satisfaction of

unruly personal desire is unthought of in abandoned women’s laments;
Wroth takes the leap of thinking it, but she cannot forget the real
consequences of social transgressions.
Wroth is concerned to record the existence of happy marriages in
Urania, if not to linger on their depiction, and she satirizes women
who despise marriage, desire power over men, or are sexually voracious.
Happy marriages create little plot development in a romance, but Wroth
does assert that the couples Urania and Steriamus, Parselius and Dalinea
lead satisfactory lives.49 Parselius and Dalinea’s marriage receives the
fullest treatment, and Wroth accords them a mutuality of desire that
creates an ideal union: “If she had a mind to goe abroad, he could never
know cause to stay him from accompaning her; if hee liked any sport,
or pleasure abroad that she chose to please her selfe withall, his desire
was her will, and her will desire to serve him” (1.519). An instrumental
view of marriage, on the other hand, marks a woman as a villain. There
is plenty of contempt for marriage in Urania, voiced by less virtuous
women than Urania and Dalinea. “Fancy” comically debases marriage as
“ties att home, bawling of bratts, monthes keepings-in, houswyfery, and
daries, and a pudder of all home-made troubles” (2.38). There are also
“devouring throats,” voraciously sexual women who provide foils for
Wroth’s virtuous illicit lovers; these women, like the fay who seduces
Selarinus, and the Queen of Candia, who seduces Amphilanthus, dep-
recate marital love and abandon the men they have sexually exploited.
Wroth ridicules such proud and wanton women, often depicting them
as household tyrants who imprison men out of lust or sadism. Such are
the Lady of Sio; the Princess of Rhodes, who puts her lover in a cage;
Olixia, the Lady of the Forrest Gulf; and the aptly named Lycencia.
All of these except the Lady of Sio are heads of their households; their
aggressive sexuality and physical dominion over men constitute a
nightmare version of wifeliness. Their power far exceeds the hard-won
footholds established by marriage’s martyrs, such as Lisia and the Lady
Angler. Objects of Wroth’s ridicule and scorn, they represent a night-
marishly excessive parody of her own vision of wifely power and erotic
gratification in the household.
These powerful but repellent women suggest that if the marital house-
hold presents a forbidding aspect to wives, men as well have something
to fear from its enclosure. Wroth does not dwell on unhappy husbands
as she does on dissatisfied wives, but many illicit male lovers in Urania
are escaping their own stifling marriages. She gives one husband’s per-
spective on marriage in the story of Sirelius, which is told by his friend
Procatus. Sirelius married for love, but has escaped his discontented
wife to wander disguised as a shepherd. Wroth mocks pastoral escap-
ism here: Procatus is “tired with rurall mirth, and passionate ditties,
[he] had rather heare a horse neigh, then all the Sheephardesses in
this Island sing” (1.517). Sirelius’s retreat into male society, poetry,
and rustic simplicity implies that even marriages for love create a need
for male escape. Wroth repeats this pattern in the temptation of the
husbands in the Second Part of Urania: Selarinus, Philarchos, Steriamus,
Leonius, and Rosindy – all those heroes happily married in Part 1,
except Parselius and Antissius – are tempted to infidelity in a series of
parallel episodes. Wroth portrays these husbands as having aged and
become unfamiliar with the business of knight errancy during years of
marriage; for each of them, the loss of the infants presents a chance
to recapture romantic masculinity through martial endeavors, wander-
ing, and male society. Rosindy, for example, “ha[d] longe binn shutt
up in idlenes (att least as hee thought), having gott out by perswa-
sions” and he, “Like a contented prisoner, to take somm refreshment
of his spiritts and exercise his wounted skill .… in Chivallry,” left his
beloved wife at home (2.166). Wroth presents husbands’ experience
with a light touch, not lambasting marriage, but suggesting that the
“contented prisoner” has, after all, little to occupy him at home. From
the husband’s perspective, the household is the wife’s domain and the
sphere of masculine action lies elsewhere; he, too, is not quite at home
in the household.
Feats of arms being only one aspect of chivalry, each of the husbands
feels the pull of illicit love, and temptation often takes the form of
a domestic scene. I have discussed the first and most detailed such
scene, that of Philarchos, above; as we have seen, even before he enters
his admirer’s bedchamber, the sumptuous court setting has created
a seductive aura and set his thoughts on love. The others’ experiences
are similar: Selarinus is unfaithful to the memory of Philistella in a
“most pleasing garden” where two trees “sweetly embraced with soft
and loving Myrtle”; he falls in love while spying on a woman’s private
“chamber recreations” (2.7). Like Philarchos, Steriamus is caused to
bring to mind his early days as a lover by a rich and beautiful castle
designed to replicate the Morean court, where he first began to love
Pamphilia. Remembering the beginnings of his love, Steriamus is
“seeing the delicate Groves resembling soe neere the others the sweet
and most delectable pastures and all soe like, as hee was allmost like to
have falen into a dangerous passion” (2.152). Melissea’s magic holds
him back from such a passion, but he finds Leonius victimized by
a state reminiscent of Spenser’s Bower of Bliss: he lies by a “most

pleasing” fountain in the lap of a sorceress-seductress, “she dandling him
(as itt were) and playing with his soft, delicate locks” (161). The artfully
mesmerizing beauty of the Bower of Bliss represents, in one respect,
its mistress’s power to seduce and imprison men, robbing them of the
desire to pursue the good; in Urania as well, women’s power over men
is often figured by a seductive setting that may lure and entrap the
susceptible.50
For Wroth, however, the equation of woman and house is not anti-
feminist dogma but a male perspective on women’s privacy that reflects
men’s own ambiguous relation to the households in which they are
lords and masters. The few detailed interior scenes depicting women in
Urania are, for the most part, seen from the perspective of a man falling
in love. Parselius is struck with love for Dalinea (breaking his vows
to Urania) when he beholds her at home in an exquisitely appointed
chamber, her ladies
a little distant from her in a faire compasse Window, where also

stood a Chaire, wherein it seemed she had been sitting, till the newes
came of his arrivall. In that Chaire lay a Booke, the Ladies were all at
worke; so as it shewed, she read while they wrought. All this Parselius
beheld, but most the Princesse … (1.124)
This eroticized female domestic scene – the empty chair and abandoned
book reminding one of the lady’s “chamber recreations” – suggests the
charged atmosphere of feminine privacy in Dutch genre painting of
the 1650s to 1670s.51 Wroth’s truly loving men delight in the vision
of their beloveds as mistresses of households and domestic beings, as
Amphilanthus does when, at sail on the high seas, he recalls Pamphilia
as an attribute of her garden: “O sweet waulke, by her devine hands cutt
out and made. I shall never more see thee nor her, the deere mistress
of thee” (2.183). Both Parselius and Amphilanthus are wandering in
search of adventure when they encounter, or imagine, erotic visions of
female domesticity; nevertheless, immersion in “home-bred matters”
drives them back to more exotic and masculine pursuits.52 Wroth does
not satirize this male image of female domesticity – as she does, for
example, Philarchos’ voyeurism – but her presentation of wives’ relation
to the household is, as we have seen, very different from such idealizing
views. Each sex sees the household as the other’s domain, and each is
alienated from that domain: husbands, because it is feminized, and
wives, because men are masters there.53
We can be fairly certain that in writing of husbands and wives Wroth

was – sometimes, at least – reflecting on real relations that she saw
around her. Urania was received as a roman à clef, and complaints of
scandal drove Wroth to apologies and promises to withdraw the book.
One episode, that of Sirelius and Procatus, was the subject of a direct
accusation by Edward Denny, who found himself reflected in the story
of a near-homicidal father.54 Sirelius’ pastoral escape from his present
wife may very well allude to an actual desertion by James Hay, one
that those familiar with aristocratic gossip would easily recognize. The
multiple heroines whose plots mirror Wroth’s life (Bellamira, Pamphilia,
Lindamira, and so on) suggest that the lives of her peers may also have
been reflected repeatedly in Urania’s dozens of sub-plots. The many hus-
bands and wives of Urania probably allegorize in multiple versions the
marital struggles of her contemporaries, as well as those that she experi-
enced at first hand. It is much easier for present-day critics to recognize
early modern political allegory or topicality than domestic allegory;
thus, Urania provides an unusual opportunity to observe the relation
between fiction and experience in the domestic realm. Wroth may have
been driven to self-representation in search of the same satisfactions
that her heroines gain from public reception of their private grief: an
audience’s sympathy and admiration for their moral and rhetorical
strength. However, Wroth also lamented for others, like Lord Denny’s
daughter, and allowed her readers to pierce the privacy of others’ suf-
fering – thus precluding for herself the sympathetic reception that she
envisioned for her heroines.
Early Novelistic Prose and the Overheard Lament
In the lamenting women and public households of late seventeenth-

century epistolary novels in both France and England, we can witness
the subjects that concerned Wroth becoming foundational issues in the
modern novel at its first beginnings.55 Later writers of epistolary fiction
created figures of universal tragic significance out of wives trapped in
loveless marriages and socially fallen women. Wroth should be consid-
ered a precursor of such efforts, one who turned, as later authors would,
to abandoned women’s laments as a powerful and socially resonant
model, and who injected heightened social realism into prose fiction.
As I have shown in Urania, in late seventeenth-century amatory
fiction the social conventions of love and marriage place women in
impossible binds that require a sharp divide between woman-as-wife
and woman-as-lover. Illicitly loving woman characters are split, in such
representations, between an external, conventional role and a “private”

role in which they experience desire.56 As in Urania, wives’ existence in
the household is thus divided between repressive surveillance and the
struggle to create private spaces within public households. Joan DeJean
has proposed that French romances of the 1650s, including those by La
Calprenède and Madeleine de Scudéry, are key moments in a tradition
of “feminist” writing spanning seventeenth-century fiction. In Clélie
and the Sapho narrative in Artamène, DeJean argues, Scudéry presents
love contracts that provide a more equitable version of marriage.
Sapho’s wish to retreat with her lover and the emphasis on choice in
love in the carte du Tendre of Clélie envision evasions of a social system
that denies women choice in their partners and consigns them to
dependence on their husbands. Like Wroth’s loca amoena, where illicit
love gains women a separate domain, fantasies of non-marital retreat
or of a “land of tenderness” built around women’s desires challenge the
conventional romance plot.57
For Wroth and her successors in prose fiction, the Heroides tradition
provided an obvious locus classicus for the representation of conflicts
between women’s desires and their social context. Late seventeenth-
century prose fiction brought the lament back to Ovid’s form, the love
letter.58 The love letter replicates the relation between the audience and
the speaker of overheard laments: the speaker is isolated, divided from
the addressee by distance, and conventionally pleads for a response to
her transports of desire or despair. The reader stands in as eavesdropper
on the speaker’s unveiling of both her private thoughts and the intimacy
between the lovers. Seventeenth-century epistolary works thematize
conflicts between the female writer’s public persona and her experience as
a lover. In these works, female letter writers allude repeatedly to the
public social world that, by separating them from their lovers, enforces
the confinement of their desires to private writing.59
Late seventeenth-century epistolary and amatory fiction may be given
a starting point with Les Lettres Portugaises (1669), written anonymously
by Gabriel Joseph de Lavergne, vicomte de Guilleragues, and translated
into English by Roger L’Estrange in 1678.60 A male lover has exercised
his socially sanctioned “perfect Freedom” to abandon a woman he has
enjoyed and return to France, leaving the Portuguese nun Mariane
writing one impassioned letter after another. Immured in a convent,
Mariane responds to her lover’s absence by imaginatively expanding
her own voice and subjectivity: “The whole World is touch’d with my
Misfortunes; your single self excepted, as wholy unconcern’d.”61 She
represents herself in the liminal spaces of her virtual prison: she guards
the door, telling all-comers “I know not what,” and imagines herself
on the balcony, where she once caught her lover’s eye; forebodingly,
his horse had started suddenly as if to gallop away. Mariane’s rhetori-
cal forcefulness and insistence on her strength of will accentuate the
injustice of her lover’s greater freedom: “if I could but find any way
to deliver my self from this unlucky Cloyster,” she tells him, “I should
hardly stand gaping here for the performance of your Promise” (6). The
letters, however, reverse the power differential between nun and cava-
lier by valorizing her grand passion and rhetorical prowess, of which
the cavalier is incapable. His letters are insipid, a matter of “Impertinent
Professions” and “Ridiculous Civilities,” and Mariane claims to pity his
“faint satisfactions among [his] French Mistresses” (8). Initially it is the
greatness of Mariane’s love that eclipses the cavalier, whose responses
are irrelevant in the face of her “Integrity of Soul”: “my Love does not
at all depend on your Manner of treating me,” she asserts (9). The focus
of her attention shifts from him to the contemplation of her own pas-
sion: “it is not your Person neither that is so dear to me, but the Dignity
of my unalterable Affection” (17). She eventually commands him not
to write to her, declaring that she writes not for his sake, but her own.
Mariane belittles her lover while asserting a transcendent love for him;
she quickly alternates moods and rhetorical tacks, an inconsistency
that, she claims, attests to her subjection to overwhelming emotion.
Whether the reader takes her disdain to be sincere or not, the letters
themselves create a solipsistic effect: the reader attends to Mariane
and the intensity of her passion, while the male lover only exists to
mark the injustice of her position.62
Like Ovid’s Heroides and Wroth’s overheard laments, Les Lettres
Portugaises valorizes female passion in the face of male inconstancy,
directing attention to the interiority of an abandoned woman and high-
lighting the contrast between women’s desires and their restricted social
roles. Later works of fiction pick up the scene of the overheard female
lament from romance and, like Wroth, apply its themes to marriage
and infidelity.63 In Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His
Sister (1684–87) and the anonymous La Princesse de Clèves (1678; prob-
ably by Marie-Madeleine, comtesse de Lafayette, known as Madame de
Lafayette), a central episode of eavesdropping climaxes an illicit affair.
In both cases, the male lover’s voyeurism is presented as an invasion of
a husband’s physical, as well as figurative, property. In these works, the
scene of eavesdropping combines elements of two highly significant
spaces: the lady’s bedchamber and the locus amoenus. In these later
works, private female space and erotic natural space are presented as
a husband’s property; the erotics of displayed female privacy, then, are

also the erotics of male competition.
La Princesse de Clèves’s central eavesdropping scene takes place in a
pavilion located in a garden in the midst of a forest; the whole belongs
to Coulommiers, an estate owned jointly by the Princess de Clèves and
her husband. The side room of the pavilion opens out onto the garden,
representing an exception to “official” household space from which
the servants are excluded and marking a threshold between nature and
social structure. This combination of chamber and garden creates an
intimate atmosphere, and Madame de Clèves experiences a liberating
sense of privacy there while talking with a friend about love: “Two
young Ladies (as they) both passionately in love, being at liberty, to
pass the night in the finest place in the world, knew not how to make
an end of discoursing one another.”64 The pavilion thus constitutes
a locus amoenus where illicit love creates a separate female space; the
idyllically pleasurable private space of the pavilion mirrors the privacy
of the women’s hearts. Like Wroth, Lafayette locates the space of illicit
love in relation to a household conceived as the realm of marital order
and surveillance.
Later, when Madame de Clèves’s male lover creeps through the for-
est and garden to the pavilion to spy on her, Lafayette highlights the
bedchamber aspects of the little room: Madame de Clèves reclines on
a daybed, and, as we have come to expect, her appearance suggests
negligent display: “He saw she was alone, but thought her beauty so
admirable he could scarce master the transport it put him in. It was hot,
and she had nothing on her Head and her Neck, but her Hair hanging
carelesly down” (214). She is enacting a silent love lament by tying
ribbons on a cane once owned by Monsieur de Nemours, and she leaves
this task to gaze at a painting that includes his portrait, all the while
giving unmistakable signs of her passion.
’Tis impossible to express the Sentiments of Monsieur de Nemours

that moment; to see by Night, in the finest place of the World,
a Person he ador’d; to see her and she not know it, to see her wholly
taken up with things relating to him, and the passion she hid from
him, was a pleasure no other Lover ever tasted, or imagin’d. (214)
As we have seen, many fictional lovers had in fact experienced

Monsieur de Nemours’s transports. Lafayette’s unique twist consists in
Madame de Clèves’s erotic repression and the tantalizing silence that
does not obscure the meaning of her lament, but emphasizes Monsieur
de Nemours’s position as voyeur by creating one more level of secrecy.65

From the moment of their first meeting, Madame de Clèves and
Monsieur de Nemours have experienced an unspoken passion, one that
is intensified on each side by the other’s superlative restraint. Monsieur
de Nemours repeatedly throws Madame de Clèves into passionate
confusion by oblique references to his love, along with an extreme
sensitivity to her feelings, and she pleases him deeply by avoiding him,
not allowing herself to speak to him, and evading his glances. Lafayette
depicts in this developing illicit passion an erotics of denial that
replaces conventional feminine modesty. Madame de Clèves explicitly
disavows secrecy, and confesses to her husband that she is in danger of
falling in love with someone at court; thus, her restraint is not a matter
of propriety or secrecy, but a resolute determination not to betray
her husband by even an adulterous glance. Yet it is the perception of
their loved one’s constraint that drives the illicit lovers to experience
the most powerful emotions.
For Madame de Lafayette’s hero, Monsieur de Nemours, competition
with Madame de Clèves’s husband also drives the pleasure of illicit love.
Earlier, he has dared a transparently symbolic act in the Clèves house-
hold: “Monsieur de Nemours had long wish’d for a Picture of Madam
de Cleve: when he saw that of her, which was Monsieur de Cleve’s, he
could not resist the longing desire he had to steal it from a Husband he
believ’d she tenderly lov’d” (108). He sneaks onto Monsieur de Clèves’s
property to find that within the marital household even domestic
objects (the painting and cane) demonstrate his own illicit possession
of Madame de Clèves’s heart. Now Monsieur de Nemours’s participa-
tion in the erotics of denial finds its limit; as pleasurable as restraint
is, he nevertheless presses for further privileges. In contrast, Mme de
Clèves’s decision to retire to a convent on her husband’s death, rather
than marry the languishing Monsieur de Nemours, holds true to the
mode of illicit love that she has pursued all along. Her final withdrawal
merely continues her series of retreats, which have allowed her to con-
tain a great passion while holding herself back from the man who has
inspired it. She chooses to remain in the room off the pavilion, with its
aura of liberty and pleasure, rather than marry her lover and eliminate
the private space of illicit love.
Aphra Behn released Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister in
installments over three years (1684–87), during which time the Duke of
Monmouth’s rebellion and the love affair between his supporter, Ford,
Lord Grey, and Grey’s wife’s sister, Henrietta Berkeley, provided fodder
for her roman à clef. The first installment unwinds entirely through
letters between Philander (Grey) and his “sister” Silvia (Berkeley), who
alternately wrestle with and revel in the scandalous nature of their
mutual attraction while plotting their escape to Holland. With the 1685
installment the letters are, as the title notes, “Mixt with the History of
their Adventures,” but the epistolary form still dominates, as Philander
leaves a pregnant Silvia under the care of their friend Octavio while
himself falling in love with Octavio’s sister Calista; Octavio, in turn,
falls for Silvia. The love quadrangle thus created provides opportuni-
ties for letters to be concealed and revealed, intercepted, forged, and
misdelivered.
Reinforcing the theme of privacy and exposure inherent in the letter
form, Behn places her hero and heroine within a conventional pasto-
ral world, then shows how each lover uses the rhetoric of overhearing
to incite desire by placing the other in the position of voyeur. Behn’s
amorous hero, Philander, is a conspirator against the French king who,
forced to flee France and then the United Provinces, finds a welcome in
Cologne at the house of a fellow sectarian, the Count of Clarinau. When
Philander learns that the sympathetic count has a beautiful, convent-
raised wife whom he keeps hidden from the sight of man, Philander
instantly enters a state of languishment and disorder “very nearly allied
to that of Love.”66 He wanders the grounds of the count’s palace:
Now half a Lover grown, I sight [sic] and grew opprest with thought,
and had recourse to Groves, to shady walks and Fountains, of which
the delicate Gardens aforded variety, the most resembling nature,
that ever Art produc’d, and of the most Melancholly recesses …
I past into a Thicket near a little Rivulet, that purl’d and murmur’d
thro the glade, and past into the Meads, this pleas’d and fed my
present Amorous humour, and down I laid myself on the shady
brink … (173)
Rather than finding a “Visionary Nymph,” as he certainly might in a

setting so typical of pastoral romance, Philander overhears a verse con-
fession of overwhelming desire or “Youthful fires,” which are unassuaged
in the arms of the speaker’s aged husband. The Count of Clarinau’s wife,
Calista, is lamenting her lack of a youthful lover; thus Philander has,
like Pyrocles and Philarchos, the pleasure of discovering a woman’s
secret passion for him – or, in this case, any lover at all. Philander
spies her leaning on a “Pillow made of some of those Jesimins,” her
hair arranged carelessly and her dress “such as young Royal Brides put
on when they undress for joys!” Calista’s luxurious grove calls up the
amatory associations of the locus amoenus, but its erotic power is clearly
due as well to its similarity to a bedchamber, or even a bridal chamber.
Philander seems for a moment to have attained all the privileges of a
bridegroom, with none of the ceremony. As Calista’s dress is “gay and
rich” in a way that suggests to Philander “undress[ing] for joys,” her
erotic availability suggests the socially sanctioned bride – but also illicit
and ungoverned love. Philander’s vision of Calista as a bride places
him not in the role of bridegroom, but of one who has slipped into the
bridegroom’s place. Philander builds up the erotic stakes of the moment
by reminding himself of the world-historical proportions of such
a home invasion: “just such I fancy’d fam’d Lucretia was, when Tarquin
first beheld her, nor was that Royal Ravisher more inflam’d than
I!” (174). The erotics of this eavesdropping scene focus on piercing the
veil cast over Calista by her husband, but Behn, like Wroth, uses the
scene to analyze the motives of the male eavesdropper and the mechanics
of male desire.67
While in Urania feminized domesticity held a seductive appeal for
men, here the household marked by a husband’s dominance ignites
other men’s desire. Behn makes clear the analogy between political and
domestic male competition, for Philander is also a would-be “Royal
Ravisher” who adheres to Cesario, a stand-in for the Duke of Monmouth,
as a popular rebel against the king his father. In the course of the novel
it becomes clear that he loves the posture of the rebel more than the
cause; by the final chapter, he has deserted his commander in the decisive
battle.68 Philander becomes “weary of the design and party” of rebellion;
similarly, once Calista has left her husband his desire for her wanes.
Having revealed Philander’s sexual drives as a function of competition
with other men, Behn portrays him pursuing a series of immured or
“owned” women – Sylvia when she is Octavio’s, Calista when she is again
inaccessible in a convent, and a “Married Lady,” the subject of a wager
between Philander and Alonzo. Marriage here represents male ownership
of women, an ownership that operates as gauntlet thrown down to other
men. Behn also depicts women’s position at the center of competing
male desires as extremely insecure: Sylvia’s fate is none the better for hav-
ing a superfluity of husbands, husband figures, and suitors. Like Wroth,
Behn dwells on the difference between women’s desires and their social
possibilities; but as she moves from lover to lover, Sylvia’s sexual desire
ceases to differentiate itself from financial interest. Sylvia and Calista
represent two aspects of a universal female fate: Calista, the dissonance
between female desire and marriage, and Sylvia, a debased union of
desire and marriage, in which her husband becomes her pimp.69
The overheard lament is central in Behn’s work because it reveals the

transitory nature of Philander’s love; it swiftly discredits the courtly
love rhetoric that precedes it.70 She depicts harrowing consequences
to the erotics of display and concealment, accessibility and enclosure,
that inscribe men’s desire. The reader learns of Philander’s perfidious
pursuit of Calista through his letter to Octavio, who thus eavesdrops,
as it were, on Philander’s passionate eavesdropping on Calista. The
letter, then, carries its own layered erotic privacy, which is made
more complex by the fact that Octavio is Calista’s brother and shares
the responsibility of safeguarding her honor with her husband. The
overdetermined letter itself becomes an object of psuedo-erotic desire
when Sylvia seductively induces Octavio to give it to her and Brilljard
steals it in order to trick Sylvia into bed. In repeated illicit readings,
the letter’s connotations of secrecy are stripped away through increas-
ingly complex exchanges – much like those Sylvia herself undergoes
as she moves from lover to lover. The sexual union between Philander
and Sylvia that was the culmination of the first book represented
Philander’s long-awaited triumph over Sylvia’s virginity and the
stronghold of her father’s household. However, Sylvia’s claims of sexual
honor become increasingly feeble as her social position slips, until she
readily trades her body for financial support. Behn thus provides a
disillusioned view of female modesty as a fetish that exposes the finan-
cial exchanges by which a woman moves from father’s to husband’s
households. The social descent from hyperbolically defended modesty
to prostitution, Sylvia’s story suggests, is only a matter of abandoning
pretense.
As in Les Lettres Portugaises, in Love-Letters epistolary narrative explores
the relation between truth and rhetoric through the writers’ attempts
at deceit and their susceptibility to self-delusion. On the subject
of Love-Letters’ exclusion from the history of the novel, Janet Todd
observes that these letters do not open up “authentic subjectivity” for
the reader’s perusal, for “in Restoration England letters are not embodi-
ments of subjectivity and records of authentic emotion; instead, they
are ambiguous, manipulative, and opportunistic, and they pose a
distinct political threat.”71 As we have already seen, Philander’s letter
narrating his overhearing of Calista’s lament provided Behn with an
opportunity to lampoon his self-portrayal as heroic seducer and violator
of the marriage bed; the circulation of Philander’s letter among the
lovers creates yet more layers of violated privacy. Behn thoroughly
exploits the epistolary form’s potential to dramatize privacy and repeat-
edly points out rhetoric’s power to create and cancel desire; the passions
of Philander and Silvia are rather a record of the seductions of rhetoric

than of authentic subjectivity.
Although the overheard lament in this period appears to accord all
its pleasures to the male voyeur, Wroth, Behn, and Lafayette used it
to explore the desires of the apparently surprised and helpless female
lamenter as well. Wroth and the later seventeenth-century writers
also turn away from the focus on the lamenter’s sincerity evident in
pastoral romance. Rather than presenting the private lamenter as proof
that authentic feeling produces rhetorical fluidity, Wroth, the Lettres
Portugaises author, and Behn use the motif of the overheard lament
to puncture the eroticization of feminine modesty in romance, and
in early modern culture at large. The product of these varied takes on
the lament’s various depictions of voyeurism is a perspectival analysis
of desire and privacy. Wroth and the later writers present vastly differ-
ent male and female apprehensions of the scene of overheard laments,
reflecting a gender divide in the meaning of the marital household.
For husbands (or lovers) and wives in seventeenth-century fiction, the
overheard lament often proposes a utopian alternative to conventional
household relations.
6
Interest and Retirement in Aphra
Behn’s Odes
Aphra Behn’s kaleidoscopic authorial personae, alternately defiant and

needy, amorously insinuating and zealously patriotic, mocking and self-
pitying, have fascinated scholars since the late 1980s, when Jacqueline
Pearson and Janet Todd called attention to her use of the prostitute as a
figure for the woman author.1 According to Catherine Gallagher’s influ-
ential reading of her authorial personae, Behn appeals for the sympathy
due a woman who must please men for money, who must sell herself by
neglecting her own taste to obey the market’s demands and pander to
vulgar expectations with the seductive tricks of the authorial trade. In
Behn’s theatrical prologues and epilogues, Gallagher finds her vacillating
between erotic flattery and pathos, first seducing her audience, then
satirically commenting on stage eroticism. By her refusal to inhabit a
consistent persona, Behn represents herself as the owner and purveyor
of a series of alienable selves, each of which gestures towards an elusive
“real” self. She repeatedly enacts a contradiction between her authorial
claim of mastery over the self and its creations and her need to sell,
a process Gallagher calls “the splendors and miseries of authorship.”2
Gallagher’s persuasive depiction of Behn as a brilliant manipulator, as
well as a victim, of the codes of marketplace ideology has influenced
most subsequent Behn studies and supported the view of Behn as a
“public woman” whose role is structured by the logic of the marketplace
and her own commodification.3
However, this focus on Behn as performer and public commodity
neglects the countervailing theme of private retreat in Behn’s self-
portrayal. Her construction of authorial privacy draws on a conservative
vision of public space structured by ties of semi-feudal loyalty rather
than by the possessive individualism of the marketplace. While her
dramatic works often depict the public as a marketplace, her political
145
poetry reveals another Behn who reacts against the concept of a public
governed by mercenary interest by evoking one governed by affective
ties of loyalty and personal charisma. In this chapter, I examine tropes
of privacy and exposure in Behn’s lyric poetry, especially her Pindaric
odes, in which she directly addresses the nature of private and public
spaces by commenting on public figures of the 1670s and 1680s. Behn
imagines public spaces structured by competing forms of “interest,”
while she envisions privacy as a retreat from “interest,” a warrant of
disinterestedness that authenticates her authorial role.
Erotic Privacy: The Author as Bawd
Her contemporaries’ responses to Behn’s work highlight her charac-

teristic use of erotic privacy as a trope constructing both heroes and
narrators. Admirers and detractors alike noted her penchant for mixing
the combustible elements of privacy, women, and eroticism. One critic,
William Attwood, begged the poet Anne Wharton not to imitate Behn’s
(or “Astraea’s”) public persona:
When counterfeit Astraea’s lustful Rage

Joyns to Debauch the too Effem’nate Age;
Draws an Embroider’d Curtain over Sin,
And jilts with Promises of Bliss within:
’Tis time for you with all your Wealth of Thought,
Forth from your lov’d Retirement to be brought:
Those Thoughts which Pie’ty to your self endear,
Would strangely taking to the World appear.
Who could be vicious, who had Vertue seen,
By you drest out, with its attractive Meen,
Thousands of Graces hov’ring round the Scene?4
Attwood’s poem makes a complex set of judgments about Behn’s

manipulation of her readers. Her motive in writing is “lustful Rage”
and her purpose to debauch her audience; her method, however, is
not to display sin but to hide it in plain sight. She is a coy impresario,
the “counterfeit Astraea” hiding behind a pseudonym, who withholds
the “Promises of Bliss” that she has made her audience; like a “jilt,”
she is guilty of both arousing and denying erotic pleasure. The audi-
ence sees not the sin itself, but the “Embroider’d Curtain” with which
Behn enhances sin’s appeal by suggesting that what is hidden is yet
more attractive, while concealing its actual ugliness. These lines could
Interest and Retirement in Aphra Behn’s Poetry 147
refer to Behn’s suggestive stage business, as in The City-Heiress (1682),

where a couple enters with disordered clothing, or equally well to
lyric poems like “The Disappointment” and “On Clorinda, Imagined
More Than Woman,” which toy with the reader’s expectation of erotic
gratification.5 To Attwood, Behn’s manipulation of her audience seems
as vicious as her themes; he prescribes for Anne Wharton a more
straightforward relation between public and private in order to reform
feminine public space. Wharton should move from private retirement
to public engagement simply, not coyly like a “jilt,” and should offer
Virtue personified on the stage, dressed not to conceal, but in “its [own]
attractive Meen” and, presumably, its own well-connected name. As a
corrective to Behn’s brand of female authorship, Attwood urges frank
self-presentation that eschews the calculating aspects of artistry while
remaining “strangely taking.” Similarly, an anonymous satire of this
period calls Behn’s poetry “Bawdry in a vaile.”6
Not only those who vilified Behn, but also those who praised her,
depicted her as a temptress teasing her audience. The dedicatory verses
to her volume titled Poems Upon Several Occasions: With a Voyage to the
Island of Love (1684) are virtually unanimous in depicting the author as
a seductress. When John Cooper praises “Thy tender notions in loose
numbers slow, / With a strange power to charm where e’er they go,”
Behn’s thoughts are personified as a “tender” body wrapped in the garb
of temptingly “loose” meter. John Adams exclaims, “Ah, needs must
she th’unwary Soul surprise, / Whose Pen sheds Flames as dangerous as
her Eyes,” and Thomas Creech also describes her verse as aggressively,
although delightfully, bewitching: “Thy gliding Verse comes on us
unawares … / We are undone and never know from where.” Praising
Behn’s free translation of Abbé Paul Tallemant’s Le Voyage et la conqueste
de l’isle d’amour, Creech imagines her as a pander or bawd drawing readers
into the very scenes of love:
Thou leadst us by the Soul amongst thy Loves,

And bindst us all in thy inchanting Groves;
Each languishes for thy Aminta’s Charms,
Sighs for thy fansied Raptures in her Armes,
Sees her in all that killing posture laid,
When Love and fond Respect guarded the sleeping Maid,
Persues her to the very Bower of Bliss,
Times all the wrecking joys and thinks ’em his;
In the same Trance with the young pair we lie,
And in their amorous Ecstasies we die.7
We will see Behn’s narrators repeatedly create and partially unveil erotic
privacy in her panegyric poems; here, Creech markets this feature as
a key source of readerly pleasure in her poetry. The reader experiences
the atmosphere of private enclosure (“inchanting Groves,” “the very
Bower of Bliss”) and the frustrations of the lover who “languishes”
in the hope of overcoming the guards of “Love and fond Respect”
that weakly protect the “sleeping Maid.” The reader thus enjoys both
his (or her) own violation of the two lovers’ privacy and a vicarious
triumph over the Maid’s defenses through the male lover’s perspective.
In the final lines the reader has begun to identify with both lovers
rather than the man alone. Showing that he is a careful reader of Behn,
Creech alludes to her typical depiction of sexual consummation as a
dissolution of the self in mutual pleasure. Together with the lovers,
the reader lies “In the same Trance” and “dies” in “amorous Ecstasies.”
Creech provides a close analysis of Behn’s poetic technique: she begins
by erecting barriers (privacy, respect, honor) to consummation, then
delights readers by evaporating boundaries between self and other,
reader and subject.
Mercenary and Aristocratic “Interest” and Public Space
Those who depicted Behn as a bawd reduced her to the market value
of her works and portrayed her as a fawning slave to the desires of her
audience, but this is a writer–audience relation that she frequently
satirized. In Chapter 5, we have seen how Behn’s Love-Letters Between a
Nobleman and His Sister satirizes readers’ voyeuristic pleasure. Such satires
suggest that her view of her role as authorial bawd was a self-critical
one. While in Love-Letters she exposes the artificiality of overheard
laments, elsewhere she criticizes assumptions about writing and public
space implicit in the marketplace model of authorship. In the prologue
to The False Count (1681), for example, Behn begins by summarily
reducing her audience to Whigs and Tories:
Know all the Whiggs and Tories of the Pit,

(Ye furious Guelfs and Gibelines of Wit,
Who for the Cause, and crimes of Forty one
So furiously maintain the Quarrel on.)
Our Author as you’l find it writ in story,
Has hitherto been a most wicked Tory;
But now to th’joy o’ th’ Brethren be it spoken,
Our Sisters vain mistaking eyes are open;
And wisely valluing her dear interest now,

All powerfull Whiggs, converted is to you.8
Her mock conversion to the Whig party is motivated by her “dear

interest,” a key term for Behn’s thought on public space. Here, it connotes
the subjugation of the individual to commercial logic – to the merce-
nary “wisdom” of becoming less a person than an object for sale.
Exploring Behn’s portrayal of public space requires an overview of the
multivalent uses of “interest,” a term of increasing significance throughout
seventeenth-century Europe. In earlier English uses, it meant a “right,”
“share,” or “claim” to someone or something. Thus, “interest” could be
applied to affective ties or to profitable enterprises; in both cases, it
identified an individual’s property rights. Shakespeare, an author espe-
cially fond of depicting love relations through metaphors of property
and finance, has Audrey from As You Like It (c. 1598–1600) repudiate a
lover who “lays claim” to her with the words: “he hath no interest in me
in the world” (5.1.8). However, as Machiavelli’s advocacy of realpolitik
gained attention throughout Europe, “interest” came to mean the dis-
passionate pursuit of one’s own ends; the meaning “good, profit, benefit,
advantage” became more prominent (OED 2b).9 Henri, Duke of Rohan’s
On the Interest of Princes and States of Christendom (tr. Henry Hunt, 1640)
promoted “interest” in a newly respectable guise: no longer merely
a euphemism for the sin of usury, “interest” signified a rational, objective
calculation of costs and benefits, particularly by a prince. This language was
quickly picked up by propagandists in the English Civil War, and the
idea of interest as an all-powerful guide to behavior was extended from
states to parties and, finally, to individuals.10
As Albert O. Hirschman notes, in both its early, usury-tinged uses and
its later association with wider social benefits, “Two essential elements
appear to characterize interest-propelled action: self-centeredness, that
is, predominant attention of the actor to the consequences of any
contemplated action for himself; and rational calculation, that is,
a systematic attempt at evaluating prospective costs, benefits, satis-
factions, and the like.”11 Thus the pursuit of selfish concerns would
be transformed into public good. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651)
helped to spread this idea by portraying a stable society reliant on
individual citizens’ basic urge for self-preservation. Less systemati-
cally, the Maximes of François de La Rochefoucauld insisted that glory,
honor, and other traditionally noble virtues arose from self-interest. La
Rochefoucauld undermined the Stoic ideal of self-control and dutiful
self-sacrifice, arguing that “The great and splendid Actions which
dazle and amuse the wondring Crowd, and which are represented
by Polititians as great and glorious Designs, are indeed the effects of
Humour, and private Passions.”12 Therefore “interest” signified not
only a newly optimistic view of the marketplace, but a transformation
of the concept of public action, which could now take the form of self-
centered but publicly beneficial attention to private concerns. Bernard
Mandeville captured the counter-intuitive notion aphoristically in the
subtitle of his The Fable of the Bees: Private Vices, Public Benefits (1714).
Building on seventeenth-century political thought, eighteenth-century
liberal defenses of market economics held that producers and consum-
ers would benefit society not by conscious civic action but through the
pursuit of personal profit. When more fully developed, this seventeenth-
century concept of interest would become a foundation for liberal
economic theory.
Behn was fascinated by the idea of realpolitik, and both La
Rochefoucauld’s philosophy and his graceful writing style probably drew
her to translate his Maximes. However, her translation reveals her rather
conservative response to La Rochefoucauld’s radical ideas. Henri de
La Chapelle-Bessé, who contributed a foreword to the 1665 edition,
cited Christian patriarchs in support of La Rochefoucauld, as if he
were merely exposing hypocrisy, rather than questioning the nature of
virtue. Following La Chapelle-Bessé, Behn defines “interest” as “self-love,”
casting the issue of human motivation in terms familiar from Christian
theology: the problem is not that virtue is a chimera, but that human
beings’ desires are turned towards the self rather than God. In her
own addition to the foreword, Behn writes:
Now perhaps you will be positive and assure me, that you know
by experience a Man may be generous and good without design of
Interest … fix your resolve on what you will, you will if you with unbi-
assed judgment examine it, find self-love enough there to debauch
your nicest Virtue; at least to find there is an allay of self-love that
renders it not so pure as it ought [to be]. (8–9)
Behn relies here not on Machiavellian defenses of interest but on the

Christian understanding of the fallen will.13 Presumably to emphasize this
interpretation of the text, Behn reordered the maxims to create three
new sections at the end of the text: “Death,” “Love,” and “Self-Love.”
Her translation makes of La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes a treatise in
defense of virtue, comfortably fitting into traditional moral satires on
self-love. The translation interprets “interest” as a particularly mercenary
or base form of self-love; in much of Behn’s work, we see that those

motivated by “interest” in this sense place the self above others and
elevate money to the highest good. She consistently links this form
of interest with the marketplace, the city, the merchant class, and, of
course, the Whig faction.14
Yet Behn also used “interest” in an opposing sense, for the efface-
ment or submersion of the self in a loyalty that takes precedence
over one’s own personal security or wealth. This “interest” recalls the
fifteenth- and sixteenth-century usage based on financial ownership
that I describe above: one who is allied to another has an “interest” –
a kind of property – in that person. Behn relies on both senses of “interest”
repeatedly in her early play The Amorous Prince (1670): “Friendship, thy
sacred band, hold fast thy Interest” (1.4.103); “A Youth that made an
Interest in my Soul / When I had Language scarce to express my sense
of it” (1.4.109–10); “that Easiness has undone my Interest in thy Heart”
(2.3.22).15 By extension, “interest” can also mean a cause or alliance
and, further, power or sway over those loyal to one’s cause.
In all her genres, Behn seems fascinated by the capacity of certain
individuals to inspire loyalty or generate “interest” in the sense of
personal allegiance. By mystifying the interest wielded by charismatic
figures like Charles II and his wayward son James Scott, Duke of
Monmouth, she elevates personal magnetism as the generator of “interest”
in the hearts of one’s followers and obfuscates other sources of political
power, such as wealth and birth. Like the household orders explored
in Chapter 3, Behn’s works nostalgically evoke a feudal world in
which power is created by face-to-face personal alliances among men
trained as virtuous warriors. In contrast, Behn’s villains are creatures
of the marketplace, especially Whigs, whom she portrays as grasping
merchants or hypocritically avaricious and sensual Puritans.16 Behn
depicts loyalty to King Charles as the exemplary case of aristocratic
interest, while Whig “interest” indicates not communal allegiance to a
higher cause but individualistic seeking of private benefits. For example,
in Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, Behn describes
Cesario, a stand-in for Monmouth, as having abandoned aristocratic
interest for the mercenary kind. By his disloyalty to the king he has
“abandoned an Interest more glorious and easy than Empire … his
own Interest has undone him” (46).17 In other words, he has chosen
mercenary Whig interest over membership in Charles II’s “glorious”
cause, an aristocratic interest that would have afforded him all the
worldly power he wished and would have required in return only
devotion to his father and sovereign.
Privacy and Retirement: Behn and the Cavaliers
In Behn’s odes, as I will argue below, these two forms of interest structure
two types of public space, a marketplace model and an aristocratic or
feudal model. Her odes also address the nature of private space, and
what it means to withdraw from either form of public space. Here, I will
argue that the staging of authorial privacy that Behn found in Cavalier
poetry offered her an alternative to the image of the author as a pimp
lifting the veil of privacy to serve audiences’ voyeuristic desires. Behn
often revisited the romance of the exiled Cavalier that she first absorbed
as a young woman in the 1650s, especially in the poem “The Complaint
of the Poor Cavaliers” (pub. 1701) and the plays The Rover, or, The
Banished Cavaliers (1677), The Rover, Part II (1681), and The Roundheads,
or, The Good Old Cause (1681). Like some of her Cavalier heroes, Behn
undertook a secret mission on Charles II’s behalf during the Dutch
Wars; like Cowley and Waller, she progressed from the private themes
of love poetry to the public ones of the Pindaric ode. As Melissa Zook
has commented, Behn’s Cavalier revival meant not only “mourning
the loss of the ‘age of chivalry,’” but “quarreling with the new age of
religious fanaticism, mercantile wealth, and political opportunism.”18
Cavalier poetry offered, instead, an aristocratic defense of private life,
dramatizing heroic rejections of the contemporary political scene.
A willed narrowing of scope in life and poetry in reaction to political
and military defeat appears in the work of royalist poets of the
Interregnum such as Richard Lovelace, Mildmay Fane, Edmund Waller,
and Abraham Cowley.19 Facing choices among exile, banishment, or
capitulation to the Puritan regime, they idealized immersion in private
satisfactions, especially erotic love, friendship, and books; the retreating
hero demonstrated his superiority to a Puritan ascendancy. Thus,
Lovelace’s many poems on small creatures – the snail, the fly, the toad
and spider, the grasshopper, the ant – examine the choice of a style of life,
and particularly the decision whether to live quietly and self-sufficiently,
like the snail, or busily and publicly, like the fly.20 Lovelace’s “The
Grasshopper” captures the private man’s superiority to mercenary interest:
“Thus richer then untempted Kings are we, / That asking nothing,
nothing need.”21
Similarly, some Cavalier love poems draw a parallel between passionate
devotion to a lover and to one’s sovereign, depicting erotic love as
the arena in which commitment and desire may be safely expressed
at times when serving the public cause becomes impossible.22 While
lyric rejection of the public world for the higher pleasures of love is
a trope familiar from Sappho to Donne, for the Cavaliers, erotic retreat,
however idealized, involves loss and regret rather than an utterly free
choice. Warren L. Chernaik suggests in his study of Edmund Waller that
private erotic havens reflect a nostalgic wish to recreate a lost arena of
meaningful action:
When Waller calls his mistress’ girdle “my heaven’s extremest

sphere,” the hyperbole can in some ways be taken literally. The
poems of the Cavaliers express an intellectual quietism, a recurrent
emphasis on retreat, on rejection, on limitation and exclusion. They
are constantly drawing magic circles that will shut the world out,
seeking to find an autonomous realm of love and art, a court immune
to change.23
The “magic circle” of retreat often has strong pastoral overtones,

a feature that we will find in Behn’s depictions of heroic privacy. Lovelace
concludes his 1649 collection, Lucasta, with “Aramantha. A Pastorall,”
in which Alexis gladly abandons the accoutrements of war to abide
peacefully with his beloved shepherdess:
His arms hung up and his Sword broke,

His Ensignes folded, he betook
Himself unto the humble Crook:
And for a full reward of all,
She now doth him her shepheard call,
And in a SEE of flow’rs install:
Then gives her faith immediately,
Which he returnes religiously;
Both vowing in her peacefull Cave
To make their Bridall-bed and grave.24
Not only does Alexis trade his sword for a shepherd’s crook, he receives
a pastoral version of the rewards now beyond the reach of royalists like
Lovelace. In place of the king’s gratitude, he accepts his lover’s passionate
devotion; and rather than in high office in the church or state, he is
“install[ed]” in a “SEE of flow’rs.” In her turn, Aphra Behn would exploit
two elements of Cavalier retreat: the use of pastoral motifs to illustrate
the division between private and public life, and the glorification of
erotic heroism.
Recently, scholars have emphasized Cavalier poets’ continuing
engagement with the world, pointing out that royalists like Lovelace
did not in fact retreat from the sphere of public action and that the
poems convey political agendas. Despite Lovelace’s idyllic depictions of
privacy, it seems questionable whether a “SEE of flow’rs” or a mistress’s
girdle – or writing rapturous poetry about such things – could truly
represent the “extremest sphere” of endeavor to men once strongly
committed to a political cause. Alan Rudrum locates the Cavalier theme
of retirement in the context of classical debates on otium versus negotium,
or leisure and business, the distance between which Cavaliers sought
to bridge through the pen. Similarly, Raymond Anselment makes an
important distinction between seeking refuge and accepting defeat in
Cavalier poetry, while James Loxley argues that a significant strain of
royalist poetry deeply questions the ethics of private withdrawal, and
even portrays such retreat as the cowardly act of the collaborator.25 In
short, many royalist poets subject the theme of retirement to complex
ethical questioning rather than rhetorically abandoning commitment
to public causes.
Such tensions regarding the ethics of private retreat are visible within
a single typically Cavalier poem, “Verses to Dr. George Rogers, on his
taking the degree of Doctor of Physic at Padua, in the year 1646.” Here,
Edmund Waller asserts that the brutality of the Civil War has neces-
sitated the retreat of good and loyal men from public life into the
peaceful arts of love, learning, and poetry. Comparing the royal cause
to the Greek and Roman gods’ battle against the Titans, he suggests that
both cataclysms drove peaceful lovers of the Muses into private study
in pastoral England:
WHEN as of old the earth’s bold children strove

With hills on hills, to scale the throne of Jove,
Pallas and Mars stood by their sovereign’s side,
And their bright arms in his defence employed;
While the wise Phoebus, Hermes, and the rest,
Who joy in peace, and love the Muses best,
Descending from their so distempered seat,
Our groves and meadows chose for their retreat.26
The poem’s hero, Dr. Rogers, would seem to be much ennobled by

the company of Phoebus Apollo and Hermes, the gods of learning,
poetry, and medicine; yet the reader might well wonder whether such
“wise” gods, loving the Muses “best,” do not compare poorly with
Pallas Athena and Mars, who presumably loved best not the Muses but
their lord, and whose “bright arms” shone “by their sovereign’s side.”
From this perspective, Phoebus, Hermes, “and the rest” seem “wise” in
the sense of cunning and self-interested rather than nobly devoted to
higher studies. Using similar wordplay, Henry Vaughan criticizes the
“wise” impulse towards scholarly retreat in his “An Elegy on the Death
of Mr. R. Hall, Slain at Pontefract, 1648.” While Mr. Hall exemplified
the scholar-soldier, others used learning as an excuse to avoid the front
lines: “Learning in others steals them from the van, / And basely wise
emasculates the man.”27 The specter of cowardly wisdom haunts Waller’s
defense of pastoral retirement. Both poets seem reluctant to indulge in
a full-throated celebration of private withdrawal that might amount to
an admission of final defeat.28
Private Heroism in Behn’s Odes
In her Pindaric odes of the 1680s, Behn considers the question of

whether private retreat – pastoral, erotic, or contemplative – can be
heroic. Her choice of the Pindaric ode as a favored verse form in this
period probably reflects a desire to put her stamp on the momentous
events of the times. With the Pindaric ode, Behn chose a form renewed
and reinvigorated in the 1650s by Abraham Cowley as, in Paul Fry’s
words, “a magniloquent poem … with abrupt transitions written either
in irregular stanzas or in regular stanzaic triads.”29 Behn imitates both
the ode’s formal elements and its magniloquence, addressing grand sub-
jects in a style of breathless admiration. If Behn’s poems were intended
primarily as bids for patronage, she chose an extraordinarily unstable
time to write them, when transfers of power seemed constantly eminent.
The years of 1681–88 were rife with political intrigue: the Exclusion
Crisis of 1678–81, the 1683 Rye House Plot, the death of Charles,
the accession of James II, the rebellions of Monmouth and Argyll in
1685, and finally James’s deposition in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Although she suffered from illness throughout this period, Behn did not
retreat from public life, but wrote avidly of contemporary events right
up to her death.30 In her political poems, Behn could directly address
the great ones of the moment in a spirit of enthusiastic partisanship,
and she chose to do so in propria persona, associating her name with the
poems and giving their narrators distinctive, often self-reflective, voices.
She ensured that the political poems published in miscellanies bore her
name, and her Pindaric odes heralding major political events appeared
in glorious isolation as broadsheet pamphlets signed “Mrs. A. BEHN.”
These poems provide unique glimpses of Behn’s authorial strategies by
directly portraying the writer stepping into public notice.
Behn constructs her panegyrics around three central figures: the

“Hero,” the “Crowd,” and the narrator. These figures may be multiplied;
there may be more than one hero (as in the Coronation ode) or narrator
(as in “The Marriage of … Dorset”) and several kinds of crowds (even a
crowd of lesser “Hero’s” in the Coronation ode); but the basic tripartite
structure persists throughout her praise poetry. Each poem reveals a
new arrangement of hero, crowd, and narrator and creates new ten-
sions among them, producing widely varying commentaries on private
and public action while remaining within the fairly restrictive genre of
praise poetry. Each role acquires definition through differentiation from
the others; for example, the attentiveness of the “admiring” or “envying
Crowd” and the intensity of its envious identification with the “Hero”
demonstrate the hero’s singularity.
The heroes of Behn’s panegyrics possess innate qualities instantly
recognized and admired by others. One of Behn’s many allusions to
this theme throughout her works occurs in her description of the “royal
slave” Oroonoko, who sheds his rich garments for a slave’s that
cou’d not conceal the Graces of his Looks and Mien; and he had no
less Admirers, than when he had his dazeling Habit on: The Royal
Youth appear’d in spight of the Slave, and People cou’d not help
treating him after a different manner, without designing it: As soon
as they approach’d him, they venerated and esteem’d him; his Eyes
insensibly commanded Respect, and his Behaviour insinuated it into
every Soul.31
In Behn’s praise poems, the “Hero” exists as such to bear alone the weight
of the crowd’s desires, but the narrator is free to blend anonymously into
the crowd. The narrator thus provides a foil to the irreducible unique-
ness and semi-divine vitality of the “Hero.”32 The narrator’s identity, in
contrast to that of either “Hero” or crowd, is relatively fluid: he or she
can join the worshipful crowd or stand aside, observing the Crowd–Hero
dyad from an apparently disinterested perspective.
For each role in her triad, Behn defines private and public space, and
the possibility of movement between the two, differently. She consis-
tently depicts the “Hero” emerging from a private realm defined through
erotic pleasure into a public realm defined through duty to the nation.
The anticipation of the crowd awaiting the “Hero’s” public appearance
represents the English nation’s reliance on the “Hero” – specifically, on
his relinquishing pleasure in favor of duty, private erotic heroism in favor
of public heroism. Yet the erotic potency of the “Hero” is essential to his
or her identity; the triumphs of the bed lend the “Hero” authenticity
by showing that he or she cannot be contained by the gaze of the
crowd. Behn’s narrators bring the reader to the scene of heroic seduc-
tion, but emphasize that its nature is finally ineffable and beyond the
conception of ordinary mortals. In its resistance to complete scrutiny,
erotic privacy proves that the “Hero” is other than mortal, making his
or her entrance into the public world and submission to the crowd’s
admiration a sort of divine concession.
Thus, the private sphere of erotic play becomes an essential element
in Behn’s construction of public space through forms of interest. The
erotic “Hero” exemplifies the personal magnetism that inspires aristo-
cratic interest in the hearts of followers. Joshua Scodel has shown that
Behn, like John Dryden and William Davenant, depicted erotic excess
as a guarantor of authentic heroism: for the aristocracy, a single-minded
commitment to passionate love establishes a private sphere free of
contaminating interest.33 Behn depicts the “Hero’s” privacy in pastoral
scenes of pure sensualism demonstrating his power to love and inspire
love. Unlike La Rochefoucauld’s “generous and good” men actually
motivated by mercenary interest, the erotic “Hero” is motivated by
desire, and in Behn’s poetry, authentic desire is untamable. It cannot
be sublimated to serve worldly goals or reconciled with self-interest, as
Thersander comments aphoristically in The Young King (1679): “Interest
and Love but rarely do agree” (3.3.117).34 In her “Pindarick” poem “On
Desire,” Behn demands why Desire remained a “peevish Phantom,”
“nice and coy” (31), especially when “fortune woo’d” (49), “When thou
coud’st mix ambition with my joy” (30), or “shining Honour did invite? /
When interest call’d, then thou wert shy” (25–6).35 Behn envisions
erotic privacy as a guarantor of disinterestedness, a mark of freedom
from the marketplace, and the seal of the true “Hero.”
Over-reaching erotic heroes dominated such plays as John Dryden’s
All for Love (1678) and Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved (1682), in which
men waver between submerging themselves in individual passion and
fulfilling a public role that requires decisive action. Peter Hughes has
argued that such heroes reflect a general disillusionment with the possi-
bility of physical heroism that followed the bloody battles and betrayals
of the Civil Wars.36 Similarly, James Grantham Turner has found in
various modes of seventeenth-century libertinism a “testing procedure”
in which men challenge the limits of state or parental authority through
their absorption in sexual pleasure.37 In each case, critics have identified
the erotic realm as an alternative or challenge to public achievements;
passion delineates a private sphere and establishes a primary division
between public and private. In this line of analysis, the private sphere of
eroticism is a feminine space, contrasted with masculine public space:
heroes devoted to erotic love are crossing gender lines to critique and
undermine the legitimacy of the masculine public sphere. However,
Behn’s portrayal of erotic leisure in her panegyrics differs subtly but
significantly: although she contrasts erotic leisure and public business
along the lines of otium and negotium, the erotic potency of the hero is
a corollary of, rather than a challenge to, his public triumphs.
While I have offered a schematic view of common patterns in Behn’s
odes here, her portrayal of the progress from privacy to public action is not
straightforwardly triumphant; she addresses its ethical complications in
subtle ways. Although she clearly valued fame, she could portray its
pursuit as a self-defeating, even corrupt business, and, conversely, she
could depict private seclusion as lazy debauchery. Both choices, to seek
public attention or retreat into privacy, are fraught with moral ambiguity
and the danger of humiliating failure. The disasters to which both
ambition and diffidence could lead appear in Behn’s odes on the Duke
of Monmouth and the almost equally infamous Christopher Monck,
Duke of Albemarle. Both were famous sons who never approached the
standards of public achievement set by their fathers. Both young men
were notorious participants in the dissolute revels fashionable at court;
most discreditably, both took part in a 1671 brawl in Whetstone Park
in which a beadle was murdered, requiring royal pardons for both.38
Despite such darker moments, in the early 1670s Monmouth bid fair to
become one of Behn’s ideal “Hero’s”: a handsome charmer, he carried
on a series of passionate affairs while gaining a reputation for military
valor in the Dutch Wars and becoming his father’s and the popular
crowd’s favorite.
What may be Behn’s first reference to Monmouth, her “Song to a
Scotish tune” of 1672, depicts an erotic and martial hero. Possibly
punning on the surname “Scott,” which James assumed when he married
Anna Scott, Countess of Buccleuch, the poem laments that “Jemmy,”
the “finest Swain,” whose graces are sufficient to conquer “any princely
Maid,” now “His Sheep-hook to a Sword must turn” (1, 2, 23, 27). Her
later “Scotish” songs on “Jemmy” maintained the contrast between the
hero’s erotic success and his martial duties, but acquired a new tone
in 1681, after the Exclusion Crisis in which Monmouth allied himself
firmly with the Earl of Shaftesbury against James’s succession.39 Behn’s
“Song. To a New Scotch Tune” is a pastoral in which “Young Jemmy,” an
obvious analogue for Monmouth, triumphs as an erotic hero among the
nymphs and swains until “For Glittering Hopes he … left the Shade,”
only to be ruined by “Busie Fopps of State” and “flattring Knaves and

Fools” (28, 26, 31). What followed only reinforced Behn’s judgment of
Monmouth’s character, as he conspired in the 1683 Rye House Plot to
murder his father, then raised a rebellion against James II’s succession
in 1685. “Silvio’s Complaint,” published in 1684, adopts the voice of
the “Noble Youth” who has, in the refrain, “wisht to be a King” (5, 8).
The poem dwells on Silvio’s triumphs in pastoral life – in piping, dancing,
running, leaping, and whirling the sling – and contrasts these with the
infamy brought by his royal ambitions. Monmouth’s pastoral/erotic
privacy is opposed to the world of mercenary interest, and his decision to
enter public life depraves his aristocratic “interest.” His charismatic hold
over others becomes self-seeking ambition; he has “for Pow’r Debaucht
Love” (“Song. To a New Scotch Tune,” 31). In Monmouth’s case, Behn
confronted the darker aspects of the quasi-erotic personal magnetism
that she elsewhere identifies as a sign of authentic sovereignty; she
acknowledges that aristocratic interest can be “Debaucht.”40
The idyllic pastoral privacy in Behn’s portraits of Monmouth seems to
bear little relation to the depiction of unambitious privacy in her 1687
pindaric, “To … Christopher Duke of Albemarle on his Voyage to his
Government of Jamaica.” Still known in the late 1680s for his heavy
drinking, Albemarle nevertheless commanded the first royal troops
who encountered Monmouth’s troops landing in Dorset. He performed
poorly in the ensuing clashes and soon resigned his commission,
accepting an appointment as governor of Jamaica, where he died within
the year. As we have seen, Monmouth and Albemarle were drinking
companions in their youth and used their leisure hours similarly before
choosing opposite sides in search of public renown.41 However, Behn’s
portrayal of their leisure differs widely; while Monmouth’s pastoral
activities are not only heroic and erotic but rather manically athletic,
Albemarle is undone by “Idle Love,” a victim to “soft Repose, that
Court-Disease, / Infectious to the Great and Young,” which has kept him
from destined greatness. For Behn, Albemarle is an erotic hero in the
Dryden/Otway mold, whose devotion to a “Lovely Charmer” saps his
masculine purpose and threatens to render him unfit for decisive public
action. Therefore, his erotic retreat is not pastoral but instead draws on
the conventional debauchery of the Roman Empire at its height. Behn
compares Albemarle’s decadent leisure to Hannibal’s layover in Capua,
the second city of Italy, which left the conqueror “Tamely unnerv’d in
Luxury” (20). In contrast to this corrupt leisure, she offers a vision of
Jamaica as an innocent pastoral retreat that, like Celladon’s in Ireland,
will complement the “Hero’s” hours of public duty with private repose.
Behn commands the island to welcome Albemarle with “soft Breezes”

that will “gather all their Gentlest Air, / (In the Rich Groves, drest with
Perpetual Springs) / To Fan and Entertain the Hero there” (117–20). The
Albemarle ode’s ideology of retreat is fully comprehensible only in the
context of Albemarle’s infamously dissipated private life and blunder-
ing public acts. To create a “Hero” of such a man, Behn must evoke an
Edenic vision of private retreat to efface “daz’ling Riots” and “Ignoble
Ease.” In doing so, she emphasizes the poet’s powerful summons, which
makes possible a truly heroic privacy for a “Hero” who has signally
failed to demonstrate the capacity for disinterested public action.
Behn’s concern with the responsibility and danger involved in
moving from private to public heroism also appears in “A Farewel to
Celladon, On his Going into Ireland” (1684), the addressee of which has
not been identified with certainty.42 Janet Todd notes that the poem
“adopts the usual convention of pastoral, by which public life and
political responsibility are at best distasteful duties contrasted with the
amorous leisure of the young shepherd.”43 In fact, Behn laboriously
constructs this convention only to lay it aside. The first stanza relies on
Golden Age tropes, envisioning Celladon taking up office in Ireland as
a new Fall of Man. Charles II, “the mighty Cesar,” calls him from his
unambitious pursuit of “Loves; / Which all the day / The careless and
delighted Celladon Improves” to exchange Eden for an “Empire,” which
“Less Charming ’twas, and far less worth” (7–19). The speaker protests
against a man of Celladon’s worth leaving the state of nature for
Business the Check to Mirth and Wit,

Business the Rival of the Fair,
The Bane to Friendship, and the Lucky Hit,
Only to those that languish in Dispair;
Leave then that wretched troublesome Estate
To him to whom forgetful Heaven,
Has no one other vertue given,
But dropt down the unfortunate,
To toyl, be Dull, and to be Great. (37–45)
Behn equivocates here on whether Celladon bears the guilt for his
“Fall” from leisure to the “mean Arts” of business; on the one hand,
“false Ambition made him range,” while on the other, “the Almighty
call’d him forth” and the “Dictates of his Loyalty” draw Celladon to
“that wretched troublesome Estate” (16–17, 23, 41). Behn reworks the
elements of the Genesis story with an aplomb that Ann Messenger
has taken for sheer mental confusion.44 This revision of Genesis looks
purposeful, however, if we consider that the poem charts the narrator’s
gradual recognition that an erotic hero is an excellent candidate for
public service. At first the star-struck narrator contrasts Celladon, an
erotic/pastoral hero, with great, but “Dull” statesmen, but this turns
out to be only her first reaction. Although she initially claims that
Celladon’s “nobler Soul was fram’d / For Glorious and Luxurious Ease,”
in the same stanza she admits that there is “none so fit as you” to serve
Caesar (46–7, 58). The narrator’s awakening serves to firmly ground
Behn’s implicit point that Celladon’s public service is purely disinte-
rested, for he prefers erotic heroism among “the peaceful Plains, /
The weeping Nymphs, and sighing Swains” (20–21). Her defense of the
noble otium of Celladon’s private hours distinguishes him from what
Behn calls here “the Envying Croud” and “the tainted Crowd” – unlike
them, Celladon “Cou’d never be Corrupted, never won, / To stain his
honest blood with Rebel Crimes” (65–6). His identity as a pastoral figure
devoted to erotic privacy saves Celladon from the taint of mercenary
interest, which Behn associates in this poem with personal ambition
and rebellion against the king.
Having established the contrast between Celladon (“a Swain so True,” 8)
and the “tainted Crowd,” Behn draws attention to herself as narrator.
Rather than leaving Celladon stranded in the debased sphere of negotium,
she appeals to Ireland as “Hibernia” to offer him an erotic respite:
Divert him all ye pretty Solitudes,

And give his Life some softning Interludes:
That when his weari’d mind would be,
From Noise and Rigid Bus’ness free;
He may upon your Mossey Beds lye down,
Where all is Gloomy, all is Shade,
With some dear Shee, whom Nature made,
To be possest by him alone … (83–9)
Female generative figures proliferate here, including not only Hibernia,

but also Nature as the creator of the “dear Shee,” and the “pretty
Solitudes” as well, who have “softning Interludes” to offer Celladon.
These creators point us back to Behn herself, for Hibernia’s office of
diversion is much like Behn’s: the female creator designs a seductive
world through which she guides the passionate man to satisfaction
in a woman’s arms. The responsibility of leavening “Rigid Bus’ness”
with love belongs to a female figure who is a prolific creator of worlds
and enabler of erotic heroism.45 Thus Behn evokes private eroticism to

supply a kind of heroism to the narrator as well as to her mighty subject.
The Privacy of the Narrator in Behn’s Odes
In contrast to the “Hero,” the crowd lacks a private sphere of pleasure;

its admiration of heroic spectacle is its only source of pleasure. When
Behn calls up the image of the crowd’s private life, as we will see in
the Coronation ode, she bleaches that life of all color and joy. For the
crowd, privacy is merely the absence of heroism, and is therefore charac-
terized by labor and anxiety – certainly not by eroticism. Similarly,
Behn’s narrators mourn their distance from the scene of heroic display,
defining their own privacy through lack. However, Behn also creates
for her narrators an alternative kind of privacy, one of contemplation
that sets them apart from both crowd and “Hero.” Like the “Hero,” the
narrator moves from private to public worlds, and in that movement
Behn gives him or her a role independent of the crowd–hero dyad.
Even though the narrator eventually gives up isolation in order to join
his or her voice to the crowd’s songs of praise, Behn establishes privacy
as a locus of authority that lends her narrator the aura of a detached
critic, one independent of the unthinking crowd. The privacy that Behn
denies the crowd but carefully constructs for “Hero” and narrator creates
authority, provides justification for public action, and suggests the exist-
ence of an authentic, because unreachably private, self.46
Like her “Hero’s,” Behn’s poet figures must demonstrate their charis-
matic sway over others by building a public space structured by ties of
aristocratic interest. Her models of such poets are the Cavaliers, as we
see in her elegy for Edmund Waller. She addresses Waller:
Hail, wondrous Bard, whose Heav’n-born Genius first

My Infant Muse, and Blooming Fancy Nurst.
With thy soft Food of Love I first began,
Then fed on nobler Panegyrick Strain.
Numbers Seraphic! and, at every View,
My Soul extended, and much larger grew:
Where e’re I Read, new Raptures seiz’d my Blood;
Methought I heard the Language of a God.
Long did the untun’d World in Ign’rance stray,
Producing nothing that was Great and Gay,
Till taught, by thee, the true Poetick way.
Rough were the Tracts before, Dull, and Obscure;
Nor Pleasure, nor Instruction could procure.

Their thoughtless Labour could no Passion move;
Sure, in that Age, the Poets knew not Love …47
Before Waller, Behn writes, “even the Chosen Tribe” of poets strayed,
producing not poetry but “Tracts” that were “Rough,” “Dull, and
Obscure,” products of mindless toil (“thoughtless Labour”) lacking
true inspiration. As “Labour” these poems are contaminated by merce-
nary interest; as “Tracts” they advance a position rather than evoke
“Raptures” as Waller does. The style that Behn admired in the Cavalier
poets is easy and graceful, serious without descending to the drudgery
of a “Tract,” and infused with erotic energy that delights and transforms
the reader.
In Behn’s most ambitious political poem, her “Pindarick Poem … on
the Happy Coronation” of James II (1685), erotic privacy underlines the
difference between public heroes and the mortals who constitute their
audience. Like “A Farewel to Celladon,” the Coronation ode depicts a
hero’s privacy as an erotic paradise superior to the “humbler Glory” of
kingship (105). James and Mary of Modena’s overpowering physical
beauty and incandescent passion prove their natural supremacy over
“feebler Mortals” for whom such “joys” would be “too fierce” (98, 101).48
Behn brings her readers to the royal couple’s bed to wonder at scenes
of divine love, then turns our attention to the crowd waiting impa-
tiently for a sight of their rulers. The commoners, too, have emerged
from private lives to participate in a common ritual; nevertheless, Behn
emphasizes that while for the royals the pomp of a coronation is a
burdensome duty drawing them from private delights, for the crowd
the reverse is true:
This day no rough Fatigues of Life shall vex,

No more Domestick Cares the mind perplex;
All common thoughts are lost in the vast crowd of Joy,
This Jubilee! this Sacred Holy-day!
The Soul resolves for Mirth and Play.
She leaves all Worldly thoughts behind … (115–20)
For commoners, the private sphere is characterized by “Worldly

thoughts,” “rough Fatigues,” and cares. As we have seen in her elegy on
Waller, Behn associates labor with laborious style and an absence of the
grace and naturalness that define otium in its pastoral-erotic sense. Only
public space eroticized by the presence of highly placed “Heroes” offers
ordinary folk the satisfactions of “Mirth and Play” through a sacred

encounter with divinity on earth.
As in her poems on “Celladon” and the Duke of Albemarle, here
Behn parallels the power of a “Hero” to compel worship with the power
of the female author to evoke erotic hero worship. She introduces the
topic of feminine power by dwelling on Mary of Modena. Addressing
the queen as “Sacred LAURA” places Behn in the role of a latter-day
Petrarch whose praise of an erotically powerful yet chaste and distant
mistress will guarantee her own immortality. The author/narrator prays
to her Muse
That those who read in Ages distant hence

May feel the very Zeal with which I write;
And by th’ unlabour’d Verse be warm’d to tender sense:
That future Lovers when they hear,
Your all-ador’d and wond’rous character;
(For sure the mighty LAURA’s Name will Live
As long as Time its self survive)
May find the Holy Passions you inspire,
Such awful flame, such hopeless pain,
Wander and trill through every trembling Vein;
And Bless the Charmer that Creates the Fire!
Bless the soft Muse that cou’d express
Beauty and Majesty in such a dress,
As all the World Adoring shall confess! (47–60)
As fits her conception of ideal Cavalier verse, Behn portrays her own
lines as “unlabour’d” yet erotically efficacious, warming the reader to
a new, “tender” awareness that, with its “hopeless pain,” is indistin-
guishable from romantic love, despite Behn’s note that these are “Holy
Passions.” Mary of Modena is the object of readers’ passions, but Behn
allows a curious slippage of reference that leaves unclear whether she
as author or Mary as subject ought to be credited as “the Charmer that
Creates the Fire.” Behn’s authorial presence is very strong in the opening
lines, when what readers feel for Mary is “the very Zeal with which I write”;
but she then leaves unclear whether her addressee continues to be her
“soft insinuating Muse,” or becomes Mary of Modena herself. In Behn’s
period, “character” denoted a portrait of a person rather than a person’s
essential traits: a “report of a person’s qualities” or “a personality invested
with distinctive attributes and qualities, by a novelist or dramatist”
rather than simply “personage” or “personality” (OED 14a, 16a, 17a).
That is, “character” suggests an artificial persona rather than its original.
“Your all-ador’d and wond’rous character” could therefore denote the
portrait of Mary by Behn’s muse rather than Mary herself, and the
“You” who inspires readers’ passions could also refer either to Behn’s
muse or to Mary. In either case, is the “Charmer that Creates the Fire” the
bewitching Mary, Behn’s muse, or Behn herself, who has already been
established as the writing “I,” and is perhaps more appropriate for the
role of Charmer than an abstract figure such as a muse? In this passage,
Behn blurs the boundaries among three female figures possessing
heroically entrancing powers. She thus heightens the reader’s awareness
of her own writing hand, the immortality that lies in her gift, and the
specifically feminine seductive power of panegyric verse.49
Behn positions herself as mediator of an erotically charged relation
between Mary of Modena and her admirers, thereby partaking of Mary’s
heroic power to sway hearts. However, when she describes her own
presence in the pomp of the Coronation, she definitively distances
herself from a public role, drawing a sharp distinction between the
royal and aristocratic “Heroes” and the crowd of which she is a member.
As narrator, Behn herself is one of those for whom glimpses of majesty
alleviate a life of toil; she haunts the palace grounds hoping for the sight
“Which do’s new life infuse.” Like a lover watching for his mistress, she
awaits the coming of the “Royal Pair”:
How e’re I toil for Life all day,

With what e’re cares my Soul’s opprest,
Tis in that Sun-shine still I play,
Tis there my wearied Mind’s at rest … (459–62)
Yet Behn portrays herself as dissatisfied with her status as mere crowd
member; she wishes for more than glimpses of the “Divine Oracle.” She
blames destiny, which allots a favored birth to some and “silent dull
obscurity” to others:
Oh Blest are they that may at distance gaze,

And Inspirations from Your looks may take,
But how much more their happier Stars they Praise,
Who wait, and listen when you speak!
Mine for no scanted bliss so much I blame,
(Though they the humblest Portion destin’d me)
As when they stint my noblest Aim,
And by a silent dull obscurity
Set me at distance, much too far

The Deity to view, or Divine Oracle to hear! (292–301)
Behn stresses the narrator’s conflicted state of admiration and envy:

while admitting that the “Crowd” among which she belongs is “Blest”
to gaze on majesty from a distance, she cannot accept the blessing
gratefully. After imagining the joys of the inner circle of “crowding
Hero’s who to Court repair,” she disavows membership among either the
gazing crowd or the listening courtiers by claiming that she can neither
view nor hear the “Deity,” despite the fact that up to now she has freely
described “ev’ry look and Feature of [Mary of Modena’s] Face” (312, 286).
This inconsistency adds poignancy to the narrator’s protest and under-
lines the much-resented distance separating her from her objects of
praise. The emotional intensity that overcomes strictly logical accuracy
here also registers the contrast between the private moments of the
great and her own “silent dull obscurity.” Behn’s panegyric poems
record a tension between her attraction to the presence of the “Hero”
and her sense of exclusion or even unfitness – her acceptance of predes-
tined relegation to the toiling “Crowd.” However, as we will see in her
panegyric to Mary Stuart, the narrator’s distance from the Hero can also
represent a critical distance from the unreflective adoration that these
living gods inspire.
In several praise poems, a pastoral setting allows various stand-ins for
Behn the privilege of contact with great men and women. The privacy
of the pastoral grove or meadow suggests a rejection of – or by – a more
public world, but also allows shepherd-folk to mingle with the nobility,
or, as pastoral romance codes the higher classes, “nymphs” and “swains.”
In pastoral romances like Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée (1607–27), noble
characters temporarily engage in rustic pastimes, and discover that
the common people’s simple lifestyle encourages virtues not to be
found at court.50 In contrast to Behn’s pastoral poems on erotic-heroic
retreat such as “Farewel to Celladon” and “Silvio’s Complaint,” in the
praise poems “A Pastoral to Mr. Stafford,” “A Pastoral Pindarick On the
Marriage of … the Earle of Dorset,” and “A Congratulatory Poem to …
Queen Mary,” Behn’s narrators are shepherds who observe the doings
of the great at an appreciative distance despite their common pastoral
immersion in poetry and love. Yet even in the superficially communal,
leveling world of pastoral, Behn shows that such wishes encounter
an unbreachable social divide between those born to deserve public
adulation and those born to give it. Her verse dialogue titled “A Pastoral
Pindarick. On the Marriage of the Right Honourable the Earle of Dorset”
(1688) portrays an admiring shepherd and shepherdess basking in the

reflected glory of the noble “Hero.” Although the Earl of Dorset and his
bride, Lady Mary Compton, participate in pastoral love intrigues, Behn
ends the poem with a reminder of the irreducible status distinctions
between narrator and “Hero.” Like Behn’s narrator in the Coronation
ode, Damon regrets the lowly position that places him “amongst the
humbler throng” rather than “the Nymphs and dancing swains” who
“crown the lovely Bride and Bridegrooms head” (165–9). Speaking for
Behn, he states that “Had I been blest with Flocks or Herd / A nobler
Tribute I’d prepar’d”; instead, his “Song too obscure, too humble verse”
must strain to compass the day’s glory and please his hero.
In her odes on the Coronation and the marriage of Dorset, Behn
differentiates the narrator from the crowd primarily through reminders
of the narrator’s ambitious and apparently hopeless wish for access to
the “Hero.” However, in other poems she develops a more distinctive
social space for the narrator by giving him or her a progression from
privacy to public view that mirrors the movement of her “Hero’s.” She
shows that these narrators have fled into private retreat in reaction to
the depth of their affective identification with a “Hero.” Their feelings
are too intense to be merged into the undifferentiated voice of the
celebratory crowd. In seeking out contemplative privacy as a setting for
poetic creation, these narrators are linked to the convention of private
lament, like the devotional lamenters who model themselves on King
David, the fallen-women narrators who equate public ambition with
shame, and Mary Wroth’s wronged women and escapee-wives, who
seek a sympathetic coterie of listeners. In accordance with the tradition
of private lament, Behn uses her narrators’ desire for privacy to estab-
lish the authenticity of their feelings, implying that true admiration
or mourning demands isolation and therefore exceeds mere words or
performance. As the erotic privacy of the “Hero” proves that his or her
grandeur derives from an authentically heroic self untainted by “interest,”
so the narrator’s contemplative privacy proves the sincerity of his or her
hero worship and effaces the author’s potentially mercenary interest in
patronage and renown.
In Behn’s “A Pastoral to Mr. Stafford, Under the Name of Silvio, On
His Translation of the Death of Camilla: Out of Virgil” (1685), noble
heroes have again deigned to join a company of simple shepherds.
The shepherdess Amarillis observes that John Stafford, or “Silvio of
Noble Race, yet not disdains / To mix his harmony with Rustic Swains”
(57–8). Despite this apparent leveling, the shepherds are as worshipful
as the crowd in the Coronation ode; in fact, the intensity of her
admiration has driven Amarillis into retreat from pastoral retreat itself,
shunning “the gay pleasures of the Meadows” for “the silent Groves.”
She exhibits a pensiveness that her friend Thirsis can only attribute to
unrequited love for the shepherd Damon; nevertheless, it is the voice
of “Silvio of Noble Race” that has struck Amarillis with a sensation
deeper than love:
’Tis admiration now that fills my soul,

And does ev’n love suspend, if not controul.
My thoughts are solemn all, and do appear
With wonder in my Eyes, and not despair!
My heart is entertain’d with silent Joys,
And I am pleas’d above the Mirth of Noise. (31–6)
By proposing and then rejecting conventional love difficulties as the

motive for Amarillis’s retreat, Behn dramatizes the respectful distance
between shepherdess and hero. The “silent Joys” that rise “above
the Mirth of Noise” prove the authenticity of her feeling, which is too
great for either individual performance or participation in the noisy
crowd’s joy.
Having used private retreat to establish Amarillis’s critical distance
from the crowd and her disinterested sincerity, Behn reveals that the
shepherdess does shelter ambitions of public endeavor. She suggests
that by writing about the valiant Camilla, Stafford/Silvio has prompted
such thoughts: “with Noble Modesty he shews us how / To be at once
Hero, and Woman too” (116–17). Amarillis confesses that she has, in
fact, been a public actor, when “by th’ Arcadian Kings Commands, /
I left these Shades, to visit forein Lands; / Imploy’d in public toils of
State Affairs, / Unusual with my Sex, or to my Years” (71–4). Here,
Behn speaks through Amarillis, proudly reminding her audience of
her service as a foreign agent in Flanders during the Dutch Wars.51 The
poem appears to celebrate Stafford’s retirement from “the false delights
of gaudy Courts, / For the more solid happiness of Rural sports,” an
appropriate sentiment given that his father, William Howard, Viscount
Stafford (1612–80), had been executed for treason in the Popish Plot
furor of 1680. Nevertheless, Behn asserts the glory of “public toils,”
through Amarillis’s wistful memories of service and her praise of
Stafford’s father, the saint-like “Hero” who, like a “tal[l] sheltring Oak”
“lop’t at last by an Ignoble hand,” has “bow’d / A necessary Victim
to the frantick Croud” (87–92). Amarillis inhabits the roles of private
contemplator and public actor, possessing both a heightened sensibility
requiring privacy and a power of expression that deserves public notice.

Despite the drama of Lord Stafford’s martyrdom and Behn’s praise of
his son’s poetic skill, it is Amarillis, both poet and public servant, who
emerges as the poem’s most compelling figure.
Behn mirrors Amarillis’s progress from deliberate immurement in
private contemplation to public praise in “A Congratulatory Poem to
Her Sacred Majesty Queen Mary, Upon Her Arrival in England” (1689),
in which she attempts to reconcile her chagrin over the abdication
of James II with praise of the new regime. She resolves this quandary
by praising James’s daughter Mary while avoiding any mention of
her consort, William of Orange. The poem begins with the narrator’s
retreat:
While my sad Muse the darkest Covert Sought,

To give a loose to Melancholy Thought;
Opprest, and sighing with the Heavy Weight
Of an Unhappy dear Lov’d Monarch’s Fate;
A lone retreat, on Thames’s Brink she found,
With murmering Osiers fring’d, and bending Willows Crown’d,
Thro’ the thick Shade cou’d dart no Chearful Ray,
Nature dwelt here as in disdain of Day:
Content, and Pleas’d with Nobler Solitude,
No Wood-Gods, Fawns, nor Loves did here Intrude,
Nor Nests for wanton Birds, the Glade allows;
Scarce the soft Winds were heard amongst the Boughs. (1–12)
The poem stages the retreat of Behn’s mourning muse to “the darkest
Covert,” a locus amoenus of contemplation rather than love, where “No
Wood-Gods, Fawns, nor Loves did … Intrude” (1, 10).52 The “Sounds of
Joy” greeting Queen Mary’s arrival rouse Behn’s muse from this melan-
cholic state and gradually convince her to join in praise, as she notes in
an apologetic aside to the dethroned James, of “Maria so Divine a part
of You” (57). As in “A Pastoral to Mr. Stafford,” here the shady grove
represents an alternative to participation in a happy throng and conveys
the speaker’s sense of isolation. The narrator navigates her way among
social spaces marked by various modes of privacy and publicity: the
contemplative grove, the pastoral world, the common crowd, the more
privileged heroic crowds, and ultimately the presence of the public
hero him/herself. Her entry into these spaces is charged with desire,
anxiety, and an insistent questioning of her own identity: Where does
she belong? Does her place correspond to her worth? Is heroic endeavor
possible for her in either private or public spaces? The narrator’s choices
between privacy and publicity become the central drama of the poem,
despite the reverential praise for Mary Stuart that follows the narrator’s
decision to join the welcoming crowd. Behn again leaves room for an
implicit rebuke: while regret for the loss of James II’s rule leaves the
narrator’s muse “Opprest, and sighing with the Heavy Weight / Of an
Unhappy dear Lov’d Monarch’s Fate,” Behn never suggests that Queen
Mary bears a weight of affective identification with James like the
narrator’s, or that Mary mourns the upheaval by which she has displaced
him on the throne.53 It is for the narrator, not the “Hero,” to experience
loss and grief.
The naturalizing justification of royal power that we see so frequently
in Behn’s work looks strikingly like the representative public sphere
described by Jürgen Habermas as the precursor to the modern, bour-
geois public sphere that emerged in England in the seventeenth
century. As we have seen, Behn’s “royal slave” Oroonoko provides an
exemplary case of innate royalty; regardless of his poor attire, “his Eyes
insensibly commanded Respect, and his Behaviour insinuated it into
every Soul.” Habermas notes that the representative public sphere is
marked by its embodiment in individuals whose status marks them
out as having been chosen: “representation pretended to make some-
thing invisible visible through the public presence of the person of
the lord.”54 When political power is justified by the embodiment of
virtue in the person of the natural monarch, manners, physical beauty
and prowess, costume, and, above all, spectacle become key elements in
political discourse. Behn’s depiction of semi-divine “Heroes” accepting
public worship recreates in words this spectacular physical presence and
its mystifying effect on the audience. In narrative transports over the
person of the monarch or aristocratic hero, Behn seems to endorse just
this brand of discourse.
However, her isolated narrators provide a critical distance from which
she invites the audience to survey the spectacular politics of the repre-
sentative public sphere. Her narrator figures model not only a powerful
affective reaction to the embodied virtue of the Hero, but also an urge
to reject the crowd’s unthinking, undifferentiated delight for a more
measured, self-critical, and discriminating response. In comparison to
Behn’s narrators, both the crowd and the Hero are one-dimensional,
and that lack of psychological depth underscores a fact that Behn keeps
before our consciousness – that they are her creations: vivid, gorgeous,
but artificial. Behn’s depiction of privacy and various forms of public
life does not necessarily amount to a critique of the representative

public sphere or an emerging consciousness of a Habermasian bourgeois
public sphere, in which rational discourse replaces embodied virtue as a
source of public authority. However, in her poems we do find an explo-
ration and exposure of the inner workings of public representation: its
assumptions and its constitutive fictions.
7
Epilogue: Performing Privacy
on Facebook
With its ominous final words, “We’ll be listening to you,” Francis Ford
Coppola’s 1974 film The Conversation expresses a typical Cold War–era
fear of the power of modern technology and faceless bureaucracies to
crush individual privacy. Films like The Manchurian Candidate ( John
Frankenheimer, 1962) and The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974) sug-
gest that in Cold War America’s national fantasy life, the integrity and
dignity of the solitary individual were crumbling before invincible state,
corporate, or criminal machines whose most potent weapon was sur-
veillance. Now, a generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the power
of governments and corporations to gather personal data silently has
vastly increased. Yet, while governments and corporations increasingly
track individuals’ whereabouts and reading, shopping, and viewing
habits, millions voluntarily share personal information with hundreds
or thousands of others on social media platforms, especially Facebook.
My analysis of the hybrid nature of early modern privacy suggests that
“performing privacy” usefully describes our post-modern moment as
well. This conclusion will briefly trace four modern and post-modern
concepts of privacy: as a space for isolated reasoning, as social freedom,
as “lifestyle transparency,” and as “frictionless sharing.” The last two
concepts are forms of “public” privacy articulated by social media entre-
preneurs, and while to some extent they mirror early modern concepts
of performative privacy, they also intentionally muddy the distinction
between voluntary and involuntary self-exposure.
In the twentieth century, philosophers and legal theorists gener-
ated a robust literature defending the value of individual privacy and
asserting the need for its legal protection. Antitotalitarian justifications
for protecting privacy draw on John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1869),
which defends privacy as a realm in which choices can be made based
172
Epilogue: Performing Privacy on Facebook 173
on reason and evidence rather than either overt or insidious forms of

social influence. If public institutions like churches and governments
are allowed to penetrate every realm of our lives, Mill suggests, we will
become less rational and more driven by conventional wisdom and
the pressures of public opinion. Our individual bad decisions will then
further corrupt those same public forces, creating a downward spiral of
increasingly degraded individual lives and social realms. “Groupthink”
leads to colossal errors, while isolated individual cogitation, in a Millian
view, produces a more rational and just society.
Recent legal theorists have justified privacy’s protection by linking
it to an individual’s most basic claim – to personhood. Like Mill, some
argue that privacy clears a space in which the individual can make
choices free of the influence of social norms, persuasion, or criticism.
However, rather than justifying this experience primarily because it
benefits society as a whole, theorists like Stanley I. Benn move the focus
to the value of personal autonomy. According to Benn, the experience
of being observed denies subjectivity to the individual by creating
an awareness of the self as object, “fixed as something … with limited
probabilities rather than infinite, indeterminate possibilities.”1 Others
emphasize emotion and sociality as essential aspects of privacy deserv-
ing of protection. Ferdinand David Schoeman argues that privacy creates
“social freedom,” a space in which persons can express love and develop
intimacy free from cultural expectations. He remarks, “For advocates of
this interpretation, privacy is the measure of the extent an individual
is afforded the social and legal space to develop the emotional, cogni-
tive, spiritual, and moral powers of an autonomous agent.”2 Generally,
advocates for this “personhood” defense define privacy as the ability to
control access to information about the self; in this view, the essential
private experience is not isolation, but control over others’ knowledge.
Advocates for a “personhood” defense of privacy implicitly make use
of the eighteenth-century view of domestic space that I explored in
Chapter 1. In this idealized domestic sphere, protection from surveil-
lance creates a treasured zone of exclusivity within which the subject
can develop fully as a person through rational or emotional choos-
ing. Thus the association of privacy with the home persists today, and
necessitates that privacy advocates consider how gender inequality
and heterosexism structure our experience of privacy as freedom. For
example, if privacy protects social freedom, it should ensure the rights
of everyone, including gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered
persons, to make free emotional choices. However, viewing the home as
a haven for social freedom might justify quashing the right to present
one’s emotional choices publicly, through, for example, legal marriage

to a partner of the same sex. Moreover, allowing emotional relation-
ships within the home a special right to protection could confer secrecy
and freedom on perpetrators of domestic abuse. The legal implications
of this view of privacy are far too wide-ranging and complex to explore
here, although clearly, current concepts of privacy remain structured by
gender and sexuality.
The home has traditionally been crucial in our conception of privacy,
but as electronic media accessed through mobile devices become primary
conduits for social communication, that may change. The very idea of
social space must alter when we spend as much, or more, time develop-
ing relationships through virtual as we do through real space. A common
reaction to the changing nature of social space is to assume that
privacy is simply no longer desired. Young users of social media now
share information in ways that shock older generations and provide
fodder for media soundbytes like law professor Gerald Uelman’s state-
ment that “We’re seeing a whole generation for whom privacy is not
important.”3 Facebook provides one prominent example. As of this
writing, the site claims to have more than 800 million active users,
over 50 percent of whom log in at least daily. The average user has
130 “friends.”4 Photographs, videos, status updates, comments, and
information about what users are “liking” are disseminated to friends,
friends of friends, or the public at large; the default privacy setting is
“public.” Unless a user has explored and revised the privacy controls,
many of his or her Facebook actions will be available to the public at
large or to “friends of friends,” who might number in the thousands.
In such venues, the pleasure of privacy consists not in a freedom from
surveillance, but in the voluntary display of the self, often in intimate
or quotidian moments.
Blogger David McClure described the popular practice of broadcasting
apparently private information as “lifestyle transparency.”5 For a few
years in the early 2000s, it seemed as though the internet might do
away with 400 years spent walling off the self from public spaces.
The trend began with the “Jennicam,” a streaming webcam in college
student Jennifer Ringley’s dorm room that captured her daily life in
the late 1990s, from grooming to sleeping to sex. Such users seem to be
erasing the distinction between private and public information, and
these extraordinary changes in the nature of social life may initially look
like a triumph of public space over once-treasured zones of privacy.
Yet a closer examination shows that the phrase “lifestyle transpar-
ency” fails to describe what social internet users seek. They expect
internet technologies to allow them to determine the manner and

content of their revelations, and they protest when they experience
a loss of control. Internet users’ demands for “privacy controls” closely
match the above definition of privacy as control over access to informa-
tion about the self. What these apparently exhibitionistic practices most
strongly reveal is a desire to shape the way the self is presented to the
world. In Benn’s terms, social networkers strive to establish their own
subjectivity by seeing themselves as authors rather than objects of
private revelations. Social internet users value their ability to manage
the dialectic between public and private, to choose between an anony-
mous public or a “friend network,” between revealing one’s interactions
with intimates on a semi-public “wall” or in messages accessible only
to the addressee, and so forth. Social networkers establish personhood
not only by pursuing activities such as contemplation and emotional
bonding “in private,” but also by displaying such activities in variously
public spheres while retaining their “private” connotations. Users deploy
privacy as a code that allows them to shape a persona and dramatize
its revelation.
The online experience of revealing the self can create pleasure,
creativity, freedom, and social intimacy, much like performing privacy
in early modern contexts. Still, essential to those benefits is the volun-
tary nature of the performance. In Chapter 4, I explored the costs of
involuntary exposure, or becoming a “public person,” in the early
modern household; similarly, involuntary revelations online do not
exercise our creativity or freedom and can be psychologically destructive.
Increasingly, Facebook and other social media attempt to blur the
distinction between voluntary and involuntary revelations, which are
both called “sharing” in Facebook’s terminology. As of this writing,
user data is increasingly mined by Facebook and third-party developers;
third-party applications can import and put to use data about users
and their friends, including birth dates, identities of family and friends,
current homes, original hometowns, educational histories, places of work,
and “activities, interests, things I like.” Meanwhile, Facebook collects
additional information about each user, including GPS location, websites
visited, and IP address, and may reveal that information to third parties;
according to the privacy policy, users’ real names are removed in the
latter case.6
It is neither surprising nor necessarily exploitative that online
businesses are attempting to discover how to profit from the vast amounts
of data they control. However, Facebook also works to change our atti-
tudes towards personal revelations and their role in social interactions.
Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg portrays the company as a mere follower

of social trends:
People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more infor-
mation and different kinds, but more openly and with more people.
That social norm is just something that has evolved over time. We
view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and
be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social
norms are.7
Despite such protests, repeated reversals of policy in response to com-

plaints and lawsuits suggest that Facebook is not merely giving the
people what they want. In 2006, it rolled out Beacon, an application
that passively broadcast users’ online activity, including purchases and
media consumption, to their networks. Eventually, Facebook discon-
tinued the service and settled (for $9.5 million) a class-action lawsuit
charging that Beacon violated federal wiretapping and video-rental
privacy laws. In December 2009, it altered privacy controls, defaulting
350 million users to the most public settings. Following this, the Federal
Trade Commission charged that Facebook had “deceived consumers by
telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private,
and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public,” leading
to a proposed settlement in which the site agrees to submit to periodic
reviews of its privacy practices by an independent third party for the
next 20 years.8 Zuckerberg’s soothing public relations mantra evades the
fact that the vast trove of data daily collected by Facebook servers offers
a tantalizing, and as yet hardly tapped, source of profit. It continues to
expose its users in new ways because doing so may open new revenue
streams. Although social norms are changing, Facebook’s treatment of
user privacy is not simply a reflection of the way in which people value
privacy now; the site and its users participate in a dynamic push-and-pull
that will help to shape the future of privacy and social relations.
Facebook’s 2011 initiative, “frictionless sharing,” allowed third-party
applications to broadcast users’ actions to their networks; by default,
apps like Spotify and the Washington Post keep users’ friends apprised
of what songs they are listening to and what articles they are reading.
“Frictionless sharing” offers privacy control only before or after the fact,
as users either choose to allow the apps to “connect to my timeline” or,
later, remove the offending revelations item by item. The concept of
“frictionless sharing” assumes that “lifestyle transparency” is what users
really want: that we want others to know all about us, and that we
seek to abandon control over how and when information about us is

presented to the world. In this phrase, control, creativity, and perform-
ance are downplayed as “friction,” a bothersome irritation that gets in
the way of continuous exposure. “Sharing,” on the other hand, replaces
intentional communication with a more passive openness reminiscent
of kindergarten’s moral lessons. What could be wrong with sharing?
Especially when it avoids friction?
It seems obvious that by shaping the online experience of over 800
million users, Facebook participates in the creation of social norms, as
well as reflecting them. Current research on how people make choices
about privacy in different interface designs confirms that intuition.
A series of experiments has shown that webpage design, the directness
or indirectness of questioning, and whether privacy or anonymity is
explicitly mentioned influence people’s willingness to disclose personal
information.9 While we might think that our decisions about privacy
are based on objective assessments of the risk of harm, in fact they are
highly contextual and reliant on social codes that influence our percep-
tions of our own disclosures. This result is consistent with my analysis
of early modern privacy throughout this book. The meaning of self-
revelation depends on the context: the stage on which “privacy” is
revealed, the audience, and the performer.
I doubt that Facebook’s current initiative will create the purely voyeu-
ristic, seamlessly public online social experience that internet watchers
have forecast ever since “Jennicam.” The performative aspects of privacy
are too valuable to trade them for a passive experience of “frictionless
sharing.” This is only the latest chapter in the tug-of-war among
Facebook, its users, and government and non-profit watchdog groups.
Clearly, we treasure the performative aspect of privacy, and this pheno-
menon suggests a need to understand the relation between public
and private as dialectical rather than static. We should accept that the
voluntary, performative revelations enabled by social media do not
demean privacy or indicate its irrelevance in contemporary social life.
Instead, such performances underscore the notion that control over
one’s own privacy protects the freedom and dignity of human beings
and serves as the enabling condition for subjectivity itself.
Notes
1 Performing Privacy and Early Modern Women

1. Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in
Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1998), 36.
2. On the increase in publication by seventeenth-century English women,
see Joad Raymond, “‘Speaking Abroad’: Gender, Female Authorship and
Pamphleteering,” in Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 276–322; Lois G. Schwoerer,
“Women’s Public Political Voice in England: 1640–1740,” in Women Writers
and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L. Smith (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 56–74. For a similar argument applied
to France, see Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and Dena Goodman, “Introduction,”
in Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France, ed. Goldsmith
and Goodman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 1–9; and Dena
Goodman, “Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current
Historiographical Approaches to the Old Régime,” History and Theory 31,
no. 1 (1992): 1–20. David Norbrook takes women’s publication as evidence
that the public sphere was inclusive in fact as well as in name in “Women, the
Republic of Letters, and the Public Sphere in the Mid-Seventeenth Century,”
Criticism 46, no. 2 (2004): 223–40.
3. Mary Ellen Lamb, “Wroth, Lady Mary (1587?–1651/1653),” Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn., http://
dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/30082, accessed December 10, 2012.
4. Her verse circulated within a distinctive social milieu, and to Ben Jonson
at least, her poems fit her station as a member of the Sidney family, a clan
renowned for learning, poetic skill, and patronage of the arts. Jonson wrote
three poems praising Wroth’s “graces,” apparently including her writing as a
feminine grace that “overcame / Both brains and hearts.” Underwoods XLVI,
“A Sonnet, to the Noble Lady, the Lady Mary Wroth.”
5. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1958), 57.
6. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique
of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig
Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 109–41; 124.
7. The title that so securely ties the text to a single reader imitates her
uncle Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, written, Sidney’s
preface declares to his sister, “only for you, only to you.” Nevertheless,
far from “not walking abroad,” as Sidney proposed, the Arcadia became
public property, repeatedly revised and expanded for print publication.
Wroth’s title suggests that she wished to assume her uncle’s mantle as an
acclaimed author who preserved a façade of aristocratic indifference to public
attention.
178
Notes 179
8. Wroth’s letter to George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, avers that she
never intended the romance for publication and asks him to procure for
her a warrant to recover the printed copies. A continuation of the Urania
in Wroth’s own hand remained unpublished until 1999. See Josephine
A. Roberts, “Textual Introduction,” in The First Part of the Countess of
Montgomery’s Urania (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early
Renaissance Studies, 1995), cv.
9. Wilson and Yachnin, “Introduction,” in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe:
People, Things, Forms of Knowledge, ed. Wilson and Yachnin (New York:
Routledge, 2010), 2.
10. Ibid. See also Oxford English Dictionary, OED Online, Oxford University Press,
s.v. “private,” AI. All citations of the OED will refer to the online edition,
www.oed.com.
11. For theoretical accounts of the relationship between early modern public/
private boundaries and form, see John Brewer, “This, That and the Other:
Public, Social and Private in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in
Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private
in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe (Exeter:
University of Exeter Press, 1995), 1–21; Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics:
Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1991); Joseph Loewenstein and Paul Stevens, “Introduction:
Charting Habermas’s ‘Literary’ or ‘Precursor’ Public Sphere,” Criticism 46,
no. 2 (2004): 201–05; and Wilson and Yachnin, “Introduction.”
12. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002),
114–15.
13. Ibid., 114.
14. Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Cornelius Castoriadis, The
Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).
15. For comparison, see Ann Elizabeth Gaylin, Eavesdropping in the Novel from
Austen to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
16. Lawrence I. Lipking, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988), xvii.
17. Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in
American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 5.
18. The scholarship on women’s rhetorical theory provides another framework
for thinking about the creation of female audiences. See, for example, Jane
Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition,
1600–1900 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012).
19. Aristotle, Politics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford
Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1984), 1252b 1.
20. As opposed to women, who are naturally subordinate (1260a 20–23).
21. “Private” was still current in this sense in early modern England; thus
Shakespeare’s Henry V: “And what have kings, that privates have not too, /
Save ceremony, save general ceremony?” (4.1.238–39). This and all future
citations of Shakespeare’s works will be drawn from G. Blakemore Evans and
J. J. M. Tobin, eds., The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edn. (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1997).
180 Notes
22. Arendt, The Human Condition, 64.

23. OED, s.v. “private,” 9., “intimate, confidential (with a person), obs.,” B 2., “an
intimate, a favorite.” See also OED, s.v. “privacy,” 5., “intimacy, confidential
relations, obs.”
24. Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd edn. (New York:
Random House, 1983), 2a., 7.
25. Berlant, The Female Complaint, 21.
26. Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), 10.
27. On the meanings of privacy, see James Knowles, “‘Infinite Riches in a
Little Room’: Marlowe and the Aesthetics of the Closet,” in Renaissance
Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580–1690, ed. Gordon McMullan
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 3–29; Erica Longfellow, “Public, Private,
and the Household in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of British
Studies 45, no. 2 (2006): 313–34; and Sasha Roberts, “Shakespeare ‘Creepes
into the Womens Closets About Bedtime’: Women Reading in a Room of
Their Own,” in Renaissance Configurations, ed. McMullan, 30–63.
28. “Facts, Interpretations and Post-1800 Developments,” chap. 13 in Lawrence
Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977), 651–87. See also Lena Cowen Orlin,
“Rewriting Stone’s Renaissance,” Huntington Library Quarterly 64, no. 1–2
(2001): 188–230.
29. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 43.
30. Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). See also Marie Fleming, “Women
and the Public Use of Reason,” Social Theory and Practice 19, no. 1 (1993):
27–50; Miriam Hansen, “Foreword,” in Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge,
Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian
Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), ix–xli; and Carole
Pateman, “The Fraternal Social Contract,” in The Masculinity Studies Reader, ed.
Rachel Adams and David Savran (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 119–52.
31. See also Jürgen Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” in
Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig J. Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1992), 421–61.
32. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 124.
33. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 107.
34. While criticizing “counterpublics” as a term of analysis, Michael McKeon
affirms the role of creative fantasy in forming a public sphere. McKeon,
“Parsing Habermas’s ‘Bourgeois Public Sphere,’” Criticism 46, no. 2 (2004):
273–77.
35. Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), xx.
36. Heather Dubrow, Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation,
Mourning, and Recuperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),
11–12. See also Corinne S. Abate, Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early
Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Nancy Armstrong and Leonard
Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the
Notes 181
Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992);

Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family
Values in Early Modern Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1999); Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic
Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994);
and Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics.
37. Katharine Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth-Century: English
Women Writers and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004).
38. Catharine Gray, Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th Century Britain
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 2–3.
39. Berlant, The Female Complaint.
2 Private Lament in Calvin, Knox, and Anne Lock

1. For an example, see Effie Botanaki, “Early Modern Women’s Diaries and
Closets: ‘Chambers of Choice Mercies and Beloved Retirement,’” in Recording
and Reordering: Essays on the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Diary and
Journal, ed. Dan Doll and Jessica Munns (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University
Press, 2006), 43–64; and Cecile M. Jagodzinski, Privacy and Print: Reading
and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 1999). Katharine Eisaman Maus attributes a new emphasis on
private devotion to religious persecution on both sides of the confessional
divide. Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995). Richard Rambuss notes that the self
imagined in the prayer closet is “a self that requires its own individual and
private place of devotion, but paradoxically a self that can comprehend
and interpellate itself only in terms of the previously scripted but animate
word of God.” Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1998), 107. However, the scholarly emphasis on private Protestant
devotion has been criticized for its neglect of the many forms of communal
experience encouraged by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. See
François Lebrun, “The Two Reformations: Communal Devotion and Personal
Piety,” in A History of Private Life, ed. Roger Chartier (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1989), 69–110; Ramie Targoff, Common
Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001).
2. Ruen-Chuen Ma argues that Lock’s poems reveal both private and liturgical
impulses in “Counterpoints of Penitence: Reading Anne Lock’s ‘A Meditation
of a Penitent Sinner’ through a Late-Medieval Middle English Psalm
Paraphrase,” ANQ 24, no. 1–2 (2011): 33–41.
3. Although Protestants considered psalm rhetoric uniquely appropriate to
their own cause, both medieval Christians and Jews modeled prayers on the
psalms. See Michael P. Kuczynski, Prophetic Song: The Psalms as Moral Discourse
in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1995), chap. 1–3.
4. Thomas Sternhold, John Hopkins, and Thomas Norton, The Whole Booke of
Psalmes (1562), ⫹7v.
182 Notes
5. Evidence from readers’ marks in Bibles, psalm quotations in all kinds of

literature, and diaries like Anne Clifford’s demonstrates that readers used the
psalms as a fund of ideas, images, and expressions. On women’s writing on
the psalms, see Margaret Hannay, “‘So May I with the Psalmist Truly Say’:
Early Modern Englishwomen’s Psalm Discourse,” in Write or Be Written: Early
Modern Women Poets and Cultural Constraints, ed. Barbara Smith and Ursula
Appelt (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), 105–34; Hannay, “The Countess of
Pembroke’s Agency in Print and Scribal Culture,” in Women’s Writing and the
Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800, ed. George
Justice and Nathan Tinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
17–49; Suzanne Trill, “Sixteenth-Century Women’s Writing: Mary Sidney’s
Psalmes and the ‘Femininity’ of Translation,” in Writing and the English
Renaissance, ed. William Zunder and Suzanne Trill (London: Longman,
1996), 140–58.
6. Most early modern commentators attributed almost all the psalms to David,
although some, like John Calvin, noted the difficulty of reconciling David’s
authorship with allusions to post-exilic life. See Calvin, Commentary on the
Book of Psalms, ed. and trans. James Anderson, 6 vols. (Edinburgh: Calvin
Translation Society, 1845), 2:148.
7. Helen Vendler explores similar themes in Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy
in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2005). For Calvin’s description of the “invisible” church, see Institutes of the
Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, tr. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1960), IV.I.3, vol. 2, pp. 1014–16.
8. Qtd. in Walter Cecil Richardson, Stephen Vaughan, Financial Agent of Henry
VIII: A Study of Financial Relations with the Low Countries (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1953), 27.
9. For Lock’s biography, see Susan M. Felch, ed. The Collected Works of Anne
Vaughan Lock (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies,
1999), xxiii–xxxv.
10. Knox to Lock and Rose Hickman, 1556, in David Laing, ed. The Works of John
Knox, 1846–64 (reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004), 4:219–20.
11. Felch, ed. Collected Works, 62–71. All citations of Lock’s work refer to this
edition. On evidence for the poem’s attribution to Lock, see ibid., liii–liv;
Rosalind Smith, “‘In a Mirrour Clere’: Protestantism and Politics in Anne
Lok’s Miserere Mei Deus,” in “This Double Voice”: Gendered Writing in Early
Modern England, ed. Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (New York:
Macmillan-St. Martin’s, 2000), 41–60.
12. Patrick Collinson, “Locke, Anne (c.1530–1590x1607),” Oxford Dictionary
13. Susan M. Felch, “‘Noble Gentlewomen Famous for Their Learning’: The
London Circle of Anne Vaughan Lock,” ANQ 16, no. 2 (2003): 14–19; Felch,
“The Public Life of Anne Vaughan Lock: Her Reception in England and
Scotland,” in Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters, ed.
Julie D. Campbell and Anne R. Larsen (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 137–58.
14. Micheline White, “Renaissance Englishwomen and Religious Translations:
The Case of Anne Lock’s Of the Markes of the Children of God (1590),” English
Literary Renaissance 29, no. 2 (1999): 375–400.
Notes 183
15. Rosalind Smith argues that an admonitory stance towards the Elizabethan
church settlement unites the work, while Susanne Wood argues that the
topic of good teaching does so. Smith, Sonnets and the English Woman Writer,
1560–1621: The Politics of Absence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005),
13–38. See also Micheline White, “The Perils and Possibilities of the Book
Dedication: Anne Lock, John Knox, John Calvin, Queen Elizabeth, and the
Duchess of Suffolk,” Parergon 29, no. 2 (forthcoming 2012); Wood, “Anne
Lock and Aemilia Lanyer: A Tradition of Protestant Women Speaking,” in
Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer
Lewalski, ed. Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 2000), 171–84.
16. Charles A. Huttar, “Translating French Proverbs and Idioms: Anne Locke’s
Renderings from Calvin,” Modern Philology 96, no. 2 (1998): 158–83.
17. Jane Donawerth notes that Lock represents her authorship as part of the
system of gift exchange among women. Donawerth, “Women’s Poetry
and the Tudor–Stuart System of Gift Exchange,” in Women, Writing, and
the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. Mary E. Burke,
Jane Donawerth, Linda L. Dove, and Karen Nelson (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 2000), 3–18.
18. In England, vernacular Bibles and the Book of Common Prayer were
designed to promote the Book of Psalms as a crucial text for understand-
ing scripture and practicing daily meditation and prayer. The Great Bible,
Bishops’ Bible, and Geneva Bible all provided tables for daily morning and
evening prayer to guide a family’s scripture reading through the whole psal-
ter in the course of a year. Geneva Bibles from 1579 onwards were printed
with no fewer than three distinct and independent translations of the com-
plete Book of Psalms: the Geneva version in the Bible itself was sandwiched
between Miles Coverdale’s translation in the Book of Common Prayer and
the metrical psalter set for congregational singing by Thomas Sternhold and
John Hopkins. See David Daniell, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 300.
19. Knox to Upcher, August 1, 1557, in Laing, ed. Works, 4:242–3.
20. Knox to Lock, October 15, 1559, in Laing, ed. Works, 6:84–5.
21. For David’s representation as a courtier in the Renaissance, see Anne Lake
Prescott, “Evil Tongues at the Court of Saul: The Renaissance David as a
Slandered Courtier,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 21, no. 2
(1991): 163–86.
22. “An Expositioun Upon the Sext Psalme of David,” in Laing, ed. Works, 3:140.
23. See also Ps. 6:3, 35:17, 74:10, and 119:84. On lament psalms, see Hans-
Joachim Kraus and Keith R. Crim, Theology of the Psalms (Minneapolis:
Augsburg Publishing House, 1986), 141–2; Claus Westermann, Praise and
Lament in the Psalms (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1981), 169–71.
24. “Expositioun,” in Laing, ed. Works, 3:137.
25. Knox to Lock, November 19, 1556, in Laing, ed. Works, 4:237.
26. “Expositioun,” in Laing, ed. Works, 3:123.
27. Ibid., 137.
28. For the image of a shamed lamenter, Calvin was likely drawing on verses
such as Ps. 22:6: “But I am a worm, and not human; / scorned by others, and
despised by the people” (NRSV).
184 Notes
29. Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, 1:xxxviii.

30. Deborah Shuger observes that in Calvin’s work a pitched battle between chaos
and self-control takes place in the psyche of the elect: “In Calvin, awareness of
the opposing surges of intense contradictory emotions sweeping across this
psyche gives rise to an urgent demand for self-control, moderation and
obedience to external authority in order to halt this inner turbulence.” The
Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1994), 105.
31. Calvin, Institutes, III.8.9, 1:708.
32. Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, 2:57.
33. See also Susan M. Felch, “‘Deir Sister’: The Letters of John Knox to Anne
Vaughan Lok,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 19, no. 4
(1995): 47–68.
34. The British Library’s copy of Lock’s book bears an inscription from Lock
to her husband dated 1559, meaning that the book must have been
printed before the year ended on March 25. See Felch, ed. Collected Works,
xxvi.
35. Knox to Lock, September 2, 1559, in Laing, ed. Works, 6:79.
36. Westermann, Praise and Lament, 193–4.
37. On Lock’s use of bodily debility as a metaphor, see Kel Morin-Parsons,
“‘Thus Crave I Mercy’: The Preface of Anne Locke,” in Other Voices, Other
Views: Expanding the Canon in English Renaissance Studies, ed. Helen Ostovich,
Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck (Newark: University of Delaware Press,
1999), 271–89.
38. Lock puns meaningfully here: the speaker’s “disteined” life is in one sense
“disdained” or despised by the near-dead speaker, but also “distained,” an
archaic word meaning discolored, stained, or defiled. OED, s.v. “distain.”
39. Susan M. Felch has demonstrated that Lock relied primarily on the Gallican
psalter, a Vulgate version, for her marginal translations of Psalm 51. “The
Vulgate as Reformation Bible: The Sonnet Sequence of Anne Lock,” in The
Bible as Book: The Reformation, ed. Orlaith O’Sullivan (London: British Library
and Oak Knoll Press, 2000), 65–88.
40. On women’s herbals, see Rebecca Laroche, Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s
Herbal Texts, 1550–1650 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009).
41. Laing, ed. Works, 4:237.
42. Felch notes that Lock’s thematization of “secret wisdom” expands on her
marginal translation of the Gallican Psalter’s “incerta et occulta sapientiae.”
Felch, “The Vulgate as Reformation Bible,” 71.
43. Many English writers of psalm paraphrase reflect Calvin’s conflicted view of
the psalms as complaints. See, for example, Robert Fills’ Godly Prayers and
Meditations, Paraphrasticallye Made Upon All the Psalmes Very Necessary for Al
the Godly (1572).
44. Felch, ed. Collected Works, 187–9.
45. Roland Greene, “Anne Lock’s Meditation: Invention versus Dilation and the
Founding of Puritan Poetics,” in Form and Reform in Renaissance England, ed.
Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane (Newark: University of Delaware Press,
2000), 153–70.
46. Patricia A. Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (New York:
Methuen, 1987).
Notes 185
47. Greene, “Anne Lock’s Meditation.” See also his Post-Petrarchism: Origins and
Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1991), 129.
48. On women’s devotional works and the cycle of sin, see Helen Wilcox,
“‘My Soule in Silence’? Devotional Representations of Renaissance
Englishwomen,” in Representing Women in Renaissance England, ed. Claude
J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 1997), 9–23.
49. Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, 2:282.
50. Knox, “Expositioun,” in Laing, ed. Works, 3:126.
51. For other uses of childbirth imagery, see John 16:20–22 and Isaiah 26:17.
52. Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, 2:297. See also Calvin’s comments
on repetition in Ps. 130. Ibid., 5:128, 34.
53. Calvin, “Sermons of John Calvin, Upon the Songe That Ezechias Made.”
54. A. Cleveland Coxe, ed. Expositions on the Book of Psalms by Saint Augustin,
Bishop of Hippo (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1888), 8:190.
55. de Bèze, Christian Meditations Upon Eight Psalmes of the Prophet David, trans.
[ John Stubbs] (1582), E2r.
56. 2 Sam. 11:1. All quotations of 2 Samuel refer to the 1560 Geneva Bible.
57. Deuteronomy 23:9–14 stipulates that military camps must maintain what
the Oxford editors call “heightened purity”: “Because the Lord your God
travels along with your camp, to save you and to hand over your enemies
to you, therefore your camp must be holy, so that he may not see anything
indecent among you and turn away from you” (Deut. 23:14, NRSV).
58. Charles C. Butterworth, The English Primers (1529–1545): Their Publication and
Connection with the English Bible and the Reformation in England (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), 1–10; Daniell, The Bible in English,
96–110.
59. The Catholic Church, The Primer in English and Latin, after Salisburie Use:
Set out at Length with Manie Praiers and Goodly Pictures: Newly Imprinted This
Present Yeare (1556).
60. Clare L. Costley, “David, Bathsheba, and the Penitential Psalms,” Renaissance
Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2004): 1235–77.
61. Ibid., 1237.
62. See Hannay, “‘So May I with the Psalmist Truly Say’”; Theresa Lanpher
Nugent, “Anne Lock’s Poetics of Spiritual Abjection,” English Literary
Renaissance 39, no. 1 (2009): 3–23.
63. Smith, “‘In a Mirrour Clere,’” 53. On Lock’s “genderless” or universal
speaker, see also Hannay, “‘So May I with the Psalmist Truly Say’”; Morin-
Parsons, “‘Thus Crave I Mercy’”; and Nugent, “Anne Lock’s Poetics.”
64. Coles, “A New Jerusalem: Anne Lok’s ‘Meditation’ and the Lyric Voice,” in
Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), 113–48.
65. See also Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 190–95; Micheline White,
“Dismantling Catholic Primers and Reforming Private Prayer: Anne Lock,
Hezekiah’s Song and Psalm 50/51,” in Private and Domestic Devotion in
Early Modern Britain, ed. Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie (Aldershot: Ashgate,
forthcoming 2013).
186 Notes
66. On Petrarchan imagery and the theme of sacrifice, see Mary Trull, “Petrarchism
and the Gift: The Sacrifice of Praise in Anne Lock’s ‘A Meditation of a Penitent
Sinner,’” Religion and Literature 41, no. 3 (2010): 1–25.
67. Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 183–7.
68. “Usually said of the father, but sometimes of both parents.” The verb’s
reminder of patriarchal lineage would be especially strong in a biblical
context. OED s.v. “beget” 2.
69. Both meanings were active in sixteenth-century Bible translations; the
Coverdale Bible suggests both with its “blood-gyltynesse.” Hamlin, Psalm
Culture, 190–92.
70. See, for example, Martin Luther, “Sermon Preached in Castle Pleissenberg,”
in Luther’s Works, ed. John W. Doberstein (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press,
1959), 301–12.
71. Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, 4:114–15.
72. Qtd. in Collinson, “Locke, Anne (c.1530–1590x1607).”
73. Felch, ed. Collected Works, 77.
3 Privacy and Gender in Household Orders

1. W. G. Hoskins, “The Rebuilding of Rural England, 1570–1640,” Past and
Present, no. 4 (1953): 44–59.
2. Orlin, Locating Privacy.
3. C. M. Woolgar, The Great Household in Late Medieval England (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1999), 50.
4. Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics, 72; Alan Stewart, “The Early Modern Closet
Discovered,” Representations 50 (1995): 76–99; 81.
5. See, for example, Katherine R. Larson’s examination of closets as spaces
for intimate social and textual encounters in Amelia Lanyer’s Salve Rex
Judaeorum (1611). Larson, Early Modern Women in Conversation (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 19–59.
6. Society of Antiquaries of London, A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations
for the Government of the Royal Household, Made in Divers Reigns: From King
Edward III to King William and Queen Mary, Also Receipts in Ancient Cookery
(London: for the Society of Antiquaries by John Nichols, 1790), 154.
7. “A Booke … [of] sondry ordres, and deuties, to be understood [in the]
houshold,” 1622, MS 3361, Fulham Papers, Lambeth Palace Library, fol. 46.
8. For example, the orders of Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon, were meant
to be witnessed and signed publicly: “openly read and declared, in the pres-
ence of yourselfe [the chief steward] and my whole famylie” as well as “to be
reade openly before all the household once every quarter, that they, knowing
them, may yeelde the more ready obedience.” John Nichols, ed., History
and Antiquities of the County of Leicester: West Goscote Hundred, vol. 3, part 2
(Wakefield: S. R. Publishers, 1971), 594–8. See also Henry VIII’s 1526 orders
(A Collection of Ordinances, 161).
9. “A Book Wherein Is Declared Sundry Orders, and deuties, to be understood
[in the] houshold,” HM 66348, Huntington Library.
10. “A Book of Orders for Officers and Servants in the Archbishop of York’s
Household,” 1628, MS 684/7, Lambeth Palace Library.
Notes 187
11. Andrew Foster, “Mountain [Montaigne], George (1569–1628),” Oxford

Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed.,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/19038, accessed December 10, 2012.
12. “Order book for the management of the duchess of Buckingham’s household,”
1634, MS 865/389, Wiltshire and Swindon Archives.
13. Nichols, ed. History and Antiquities, 593.
14. “Regulations of c. 1603 for the household of Sir Thomas Egerton,” EL 1180,
Egerton Family Papers, Huntington Library; F. R. Raines, ed. The Derby
Household Books (Manchester: for the Chetham Society, 1853), 8–10, 20–22.
15. “Description of duties of officers of household with diets for each month,”
EL 1179, Egerton Family Papers, Huntington Library. For the Donegall ver-
sion, see “A Breviate touching the Order and Government of a Nobleman’s
House,” Archaeologia 13 (1800): 315–89.
16. Compare “Regulations of c. 1603 for household of Sir Thomas Egerton,”
EL 1180, Egerton Family Papers, Huntington Library, with the second Earl
of Bridgewater’s orders in Henry John Todd, The History of the College of
Bonhommes, Ashridge (London: R. Gilbert, 1823), 47–55.
17. See, for example, the anonymous fifteenth-century household orders copied
in an Elizabethan hand as “Orders of service belonging to the degrees of a
duke, a marquess and an erle used in there owne houses,” Harleian MS 6815,
British Library; and two sixteenth-century volumes of medieval household
orders transcribed by one Robert Boys, including sections of Edward IV’s Liber
Niger, the household orders of George, Duke of Clarence, and “The order of
A noble mans house as Duke Marques or Earle,” Historical Manuscripts
66347, Huntington Library.
18. For example, see “A Booke … [of] sondry ordres, and deuties,” fol. 46; and
MS 6815, Harley Manuscripts, British Library, fol. 35/32v.
19. “R. B.,” Some Rules and Orders for the Government of the House of an Earle
(London: R. Triphook, 1821), 7, 11. Mark Girouard estimates the date of
these orders as around 1605. Girouard, Life in the English Country House:
A Social and Architectural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1978), 320.
20. This extensive manuscript combines household accounts and ceremonial
orders. Collection of Ordinances, 16. See A. R. Myers, The Household of Edward
IV: The Black Book and the Ordinance of 1478 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1959).
21. “Statuta Familiae,” in The Babees Book, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London:
Early English Text Society, 1868), 329.
22. For examples, see Ian Lancashire, “Orders for Twelfth Day and Night Circa
1515 in the Second Northumberland Household Book,” English Literary
Renaissance 10, no. 1 (1980): 7–45; and “Ordinances concerning the ceremo-
nial to be observed in the households of the Earls of Northumberland,” MS.
Eng. hist. b.208, Bodleian Library, Oxford University.
23. MS 6815, Harley Manuscripts, British Library, fol. 35/32v.
24. A Collection of Ordinances, 16. For the fifth Earl of Northumberland’s
orders, see “Ordinances concerning the ceremonial to be observed in the
households of the Earls of Northumberland.”
25. “The Inthronization of Archbishop Nevill, Baron-Bishop of York” in Joannis
Lelandi Antiquarii de Rebus Britannicis Collectanea, ed. Thomas Hearne
188 Notes
(London: 1770), 8. These orders could have been written for Alexander
Neville (c. 1332–92), or his great-great-nephew George Neville (1432–76),
who held the same office and whose enthronement feast was spectacularly
lavish. See Michael Hicks, “George Neville (1432–1476),” Oxford Dictionary
26. W. H. St. John Hope, Cowdray and Easebourne Priory in the County of Sussex
(London: Country Life, 1919), 127.
27. “R. B.,” Some Rules and Orders, 10.
28. “A Booke Wherein Is Declared Sundry Orders,” fol. 6. See also the second
Earl of Bridgewater’s orders in Todd, History of the College of Bonhommes, 47.
29. “A Booke Wherein Is Declared Sundry Orders,” fol. 32.
30. See, for example, “R. B.,” Some Rules and Orders, 15–16.
31. See, for example, “A Booke … [of ] sondry ordres, and deuties,” fol. 46.
32. Nichols, ed., History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester, 594.
33. Harry Berger, Jr., The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two
Renaissance Courtesy Books (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000),
1–25; Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan
Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
34. Lena Cowen Orlin notes that domestic architecture of the period prominently
displayed the buttery and pantry, where beer and bread were distributed to
servants and guests. Orlin cites Henry Wotton’s The Elements of Architecture
(1624). Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London, 88–9.
35. “His Grace the Duke of Chandos[‘s] Instructions to his Following Servants,”
1721, ST 44, Stowe Manuscripts, Huntington Library.
36. On feudal household organization and the transition to patronage forms of
obligation, see J. M. W. Bean, From Lord to Patron: Lordship in Late Medieval
England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).
37. Hope, Cowdray and Easebourne Priory in the County of Sussex, 131.
38. “Copy of an Original Manuscript, Containing Orders Made by Henry Prince
of Wales,” Archaeologia 14 (1803): 257.
39. Nichols, ed., History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester, 595.
40. Orlin calls this process “atomization” of domestic living spaces, and argues
that it both brought residents into closer contact and, rather than necessarily
increasing privacy, created new opportunities for display. Orlin, Locating
Privacy in Tudor London, 5.
41. Grosseteste, “Statuta Familiae,” 330–31.
42. “A Booke Wherein Is Declared Sundry Orders,” fol. 12.
43. “Orders Made by Henry Prince of Wales,” 253.
44. Kate Mertes, The English Noble Household, 1250–1600: Good Governance and
Politic Rule (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 188; Lawrence Stone, The Crisis
of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 156–64.
45. Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early
Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 5–6.
46. See P. W. Fleming, “Household Servants of the Yorkist and Early Tudor
Gentry,” in Early Tudor England: Proceedings of the 1987 Harlaxton Symposium,
ed. Daniel Williams (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1989), 19–36;
Bridget Hill, Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996), 22–43; Tim Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender,
Notes 189
1660–1750: Life and Work in the London Household (New York: Pearson
Education, 2000), 16; R. C. Richardson, Household Servants in Early Modern
England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 66, 222.
47. Robert Sidney, “Orders appointed by the right Honorable Robert Earle of
Leycester to be observed, hereafter in his Honors house,” 1625–26, U1475 E35,
The De L’Isle Manuscripts, Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, Kent.
48. “R. B.,” Some Rules and Orders, 45.
49. See David Howarth, Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaissance,
1485–1649 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 177–83; Ronald
Lightbrown, “Isaac Besnier, Sculptor to Charles I and his Work for Court
Patrons, c. 1624–1634,” in Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts: Essays
in Honour of Sir Oliver Millar, ed. David Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge
50. “Order book for the management of the duchess of Buckingham’s
household,” 12.
51. J. G. Elzinga, “Browne, Anthony, First Viscount Montagu (1528–1592),”
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004),
online edn., http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/3667, accessed December
10, 2012; Michael C. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern
England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550–1640 (Cambridge:
52. John Murdoch, The English Miniature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1981), 73–84.
53. Precise execution characterized miniatures generally, but cabinet miniatures
expanded the canvas, allowing more of Hilliard’s brilliantly colored textiles
and jewelry and more complex symbolism in both Hilliard and Oliver. Roy
Strong speculates that cabinet miniatures must have taken much longer to
execute and cost much more than smaller ones. Strong, “From Manuscript
to Miniature,” chap. 2 in The English Miniature, ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale
54. Keith Cunliffe suggests either “Alike in character and in face” or “The heart
matches the outward form.” Quoted in Karen Hearn, Dynasties: Painting in
Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530–1630 (New York: Rizzoli, 1996), no. 81.
55. Perhaps the Brownes commissioned another symbolic portrait of Catholic
brotherhood; George Vertue notes that the withdrawing rooms at Cowdray
held a picture of “two brothers hand in hand, a church behind.” George
Vertue, Note Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931–32), 2:82.
56. Ibid.
57. Roy C. Strong and V. J. Murrell, Artists of the Tudor Court: The Portrait Miniature
Rediscovered, 1520–1620 (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1983), 164.
58. See Gervase Jackson-Stops and National Gallery of Art, The Treasure Houses of
Britain: Five Hundred Years of Private Patronage and Art Collecting (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 119.
59. Hope, Cowdray and Easebourne Priory, 123.
60. On this engraving as Protestant propaganda, see David Acton, “The Wars of
Religion,” in The French Renaissance in Prints from the Bibliothèque Nationale
de France (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 416–18.
61. Jill Finsten, Isaac Oliver: Art and the Courts of Elizabeth I and James I
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1981), 21–33.
190 Notes
62. The interior setting and its architectural motifs may have been inspired
by Hans Eworth’s portrait, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley and His Brother, 1563
(Royal Collection).
63. Questier, Catholicism and Community, 168–9.
64. Ibid., 264–5.
65. Hope, Cowdray and Easebourne Priory, 120.
66. Questier, Catholicism and Community, 279–81.
67. See also Timothy J. McCann, “‘The Known Style of a Dedication Is Flattery’:
Anthony Browne, 2nd. Viscount Montagu of Cowdray and His Sussex
Flatterers,” Recusant History 19 (1989): 396–410.
68. Lawrence Stone, Family and Fortune: Studies in Aristocratic Finance in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 251–2.
69. John Smyth, The Lives of the Berkeleys, Lords of the Honour, Castle and Manor
of Berkeley, in the County of Gloucester, from 1066 to 1618, ed. John Maclean
(Gloucester: Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 1883), 393.
70. Cecil H. Clough, “Townshend, Sir John (1567/8–1603),” Oxford Dictionary
71. John Gurney, “Lady Jane Berkeley, Ashley House, and Architectural
Innovation in Late-Elizabethan England,” Architectural History 43 (2000):
117.
72. James M. Rosenheim, Townshend of Raynham: Nobility in Transition in
Restoration and Early Hanoverian England (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
73. Gurney, “Lady Jane Berkeley, Ashley House,” 113–20. See also A. H. Gomme
and Alison Maguire, Design and Plan in the Country House: From Castle Donjons
to Palladian Boxes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 255–6. Alice
T. Friedman speculates that female householders like Bess of Hardwick might
have been drawn to the new, unconventional house plan because they
were less bound by the traditional patriarchal social roles reflected in the
design of the great hall. Friedman, “Architecture, Authority, and the Female
Gaze: Planning and Representation in the Early Modern Country House,”
Assemblage 18 (1992): 40–61.
74. Smyth, The Lives of the Berkeleys, 418.
75. Quoted in W. David Kay, “Epicoene, Lady Compton, and the Gendering of
Jonsonian Satire on Extravagance,” Ben Jonson Journal 6 (1999): 17.
76. François de Bassompierre, Memoirs of the Embassy of the Marshal de
Bassompierre to the Court of England in 1626, ed. John Wilson Croker (London:
J. Murray, 1819), 126–8.
77. Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge:
78. Katie Whitaker, A Royal Passion: The Turbulent Marriage of King Charles I
of England and Henrietta Maria of France (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010),
59–83.
79. Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, The Manuscripts of Henry
Duncan Skrine, Esq.: Salvetti Correspondence (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode,
1887), 6–7.
80. Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of Charles the First: Containing a Series of
Historical and Confidential Letters (London: H. Colburn, 1849), 1:33.
Notes 191
81. Michelle Anne White, Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2006), 12.
82. Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria, 55–6.
83. Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Salvetti Correspondence, 85.
84. Allen B. Hinds, ed., “Venice: September 1628, 26–30,” Calendar of State Papers
Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice (1916), 21:307–24, British
History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=89188,
accessed January 12, 2012.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid., 368–86.
87. London, Collection of Ordinances, 340.
4 Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well: Mastery

and Publicity
1. On early modern perceptions of the social milieu of ballad dissemination,
see Natascha Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550–1650,
tr. Gayna Walls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 13–39.
2. Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, 813–19; King Henry IV, Part 1 (3.1.127).
Chapman, along with other examples, is quoted in Würzbach, English Street
Ballad, 263.
3. Susan Snyder, “Naming Names in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Shakespeare
Quarterly 43, no. 3 (1992): 271–2.
4. The generic affiliation of All’s Well That Ends Well has long been a matter of
critical debate. See Regina Buccola, “‘As Sweet as Sharp’: Helena and the Fairy
Bride Tradition,” in All’s Well, That Ends Well: New Critical Essays, ed. Gary
F. Waller (New York: Routledge, 2007), 71–84; E. A. J. Honigmann, Myriad-
Minded Shakespeare (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989); David Scott Kastan,
“All’s Well That Ends Well and the Limits of Comedy,” ELH 52, no. 3 (1985):
575–89; Clifford Leech, “The Theme of Ambition in All’s Well That Ends
Well,” ELH 21, no. 1 (1954): 17–29; Alexander Leggatt, “All’s Well That
Ends Well and the Testing of Romance,” Modern Language Quarterly 32, no. 1
(1971): 21–41; Steven Mentz, “Revising the Sources: Novella, Romance, and
the Meanings of Fiction in All’s Well, That Ends Well,” in Waller, ed., New
Critical Essays, 57–70; and E. C. Pettet, Shakespeare and the Romance Tradition
(Brooklyn, NY: Haskell House Publishers, 1976).
5. John Kerrigan, ed., Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’:
A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Götz Schmitz, The Fall
of Women in Early English Narrative Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990).
6. Walter J. Ong, “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction,” PMLA 90, no. 1
(1975): 9–21. I have modernized ballad titles in the text and included full,
old-spelling titles in the notes.
7. Anon., “A mery Ballet of the Hathorne tre,” in Tudor Songs and Ballads
from MS Cotton Vespasian A-25, ed. Peter J. Seng (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1978), 82–4. The ballad was first printed in 1790; most of
the manuscript appears to date from early in Elizabeth’s reign, prior to 1576.
A seventeenth-century hand has appended “G. Peele” to the ballad, but
192 Notes
modern editors agree that George Peele is not likely to have been the author.
Seng, “Introduction,” xii–xxi.
8. Although at first the reader does not necessarily know that this is a fallen-
woman ballad, the title suggests the topic of love and sexuality. The haw-
thorn tree symbolized desire in medieval literature: its thorns corresponded
to the pain resulting from lust and its fragrant blossoms, its pleasures. Also
called the “May tree,” the hawthorn flowered in May and its branches were
cut for decoration as part of May Day festivities. As we know from Phillip
Stubbes’s Anatomie of Abuses (1583) and Robert Herrick’s “Corinna’s Going
A Maying,” young people’s May Day flower-gathering excursions were
blamed (or praised, as in Herrick) for encouraging premarital sex. See Susan
S. Eberly, “A Thorn Among the Lilies: The Hawthorn in Medieval Love
Allegory,” Folklore 100, no. 1 (1989): 41–52.
9. W[illiam] E[lderton], “The Pangs of Love and Lovers Fittes,” (1559), in
J. Payne Collier, ed., Old Ballads, from Early Printed Copies (London: Printed
for The Percy Society, 1840), 25–8.
10. The ballad assumes that Helen of Troy and Cressida make an obvious pair of
archetypes to be emulated by maids ready to fall:
When Paris was enamoured

With Helena, dame bewties peare,
Whom Venus first him promised
To ventor on, and not to feare,
What sturdy stormes endured he
Lady! lady!
To winne her love, or it would be,
My deare ladye.
Knowe ye not, how Troylus

Languished and lost his joye,
With fittes and fevers mervailous
For Cressida that dwelt in Troye;
Tyll pytie planted in her brest,
Ladie! ladie!
To slepe with him, and graunt him rest,
My deare ladie. (9–24)
11. John S. Farmer, ed., Merry Songs and Ballads (New York: Cooper Square
Publishers, 1964), 1:82–3.
12. “A Complaint,” Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., The Paradise of Dainty Devices
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 117–18. Entered as
“A proper ballad dialoge wise betwene Troylus and Cressida” in the Stationers’
Register on June 23, 1581 by Edward White. See also “The history of Troilus
whose throtes hath Well bene tried,” entered 1565–66 by Thomas Purfoote.
Rollins, An Analytical Index to the Ballad-Entries (1557–1709) (Hatboro, PA:
Tradition Press, 1967), 57, 99.
13. On Jane Shore and Rosamond ballads, see James L. Harner, “‘The Wofull
Lamentation of Mistris Jane Shore’: The Popularity of an Elizabethan
Ballad,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 71 (1977): 137–50;
Notes 193
Samuel M. Pratt, “Jane Shore and the Elizabethans: Some Facts and
Speculations,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 11, no. 4 (1970):
1293–1306; and Maria M. Scott, Re-Presenting Jane Shore: Harlot and Heroine
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
14. “A Courtly new Ballad of the Princely Wooing of the faire Maid of London
by King Edward,” in William Chappell, ed., The Roxburghe Ballads (1869;
reprinted by AMS Press, New York, 1966), 1:181–5. An earlier edition appears
in the Stationers’ Register on March 1, 1600, entered by William White as
“A Courtly new songe of the princely wooynge of A fayre mayde of London;
also the fayre mayde of Londons Answere to the same”; other editions
appeared in 1624 and 1675. Rollins, Analytical Index, 76; 190–91. On the
popularity of this ballad, see Chappell’s note in Roxburghe Ballads.
15. [Thomas Deloney], “The Woful Lamentation of Mrs. Jane Shore, a Goldsmith’s
Wife of London, sometime King Edward the Fourth’s Concubine, who for
her Wanton Life came to a Miserable End. Set forth for the Example of all
wicked Livers,” [n.d.], in Chappell, ed., The Roxburghe Ballads 1:483–92. “The
Lamentacon of mistres Jane Shore” was entered in the Stationers’ Register
to William White on June 11, 1603. See Edward Arber, A Transcript of the
Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 (London: privately
printed, 1895–97).
16. On imitations of Heroicall Epistles, see J. William Hebel, ed., The Works of
Michael Drayton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1941), 5:97–9.
17. See Hebel, ibid., 102–04, 128. See also Kenji Go, “The Bawdy ‘Talent’ to
‘Occupy’ in Cymbeline, The Complaint of Rosamond, and the Elizabethan
Homily for Rogation Week,” Review of English Studies 54, no. 213 (2003):
27–51.
18. [Thomas Deloney], “The Life and Death of Fair Rosamond, King Henry the
Second’s Concubine,” [n.d.], The Roxburghe Ballads 6:673–6. The editor’s note
gives 1607 as the last possible date, but suggests that the Rosamond ballad
may have been published in 1592/93 in Thomas Deloney’s Garland of Good
Will.
19. Merry Songs, 4:100–01.
20. Quoted in Ian Frederick Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early
Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 48–9. According to
Moulton, the manuscript collection in which this poem appears dates to the
early seventeenth century (MS Rosenbach 1083/15).
21. Quoted in Harner, “The Wofull Lamentation” (1977), 140.
22. William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, ed. Joseph Jacobs (New York: Dover
Publications, 1966), 1:174.
23. Ibid.
24. On the importance of the Countess as family head in the play, see Erin
Ellerbeck, “Adoption and the Language of Horticulture in All’s Well That
Ends Well,” Studies in English Literature 51, no. 2 (2011): 305–26.
25. On imagining privacy through the anachronistic notion of the castle, see
Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture, 1–13.
26. Psychoanalytic criticism has considered Bertram’s initial refusal to marry
Helena to indicate a fear of symbolically breaking the prohibition on incest.
However, Lafew picks up Bertram’s language to characterize his mastery of
Parolles: he “finds” Parolles and therefore subjugates him. Both Lafew and
194 Notes
Bertram’s assertions depend on the fantasy that only the servant becomes
known through the familiar relation of master and servant; the master retains
his invulnerability. Thus, a servant who knows the master’s secrets gener-
ates horror. On the incest prohibition and marriage in All’s Well, see Janet
Adelman, “Bed Tricks: On Marriage as the End of Comedy in All’s Well That
Ends Well and Measure for Measure,” in Shakespeare’s Personality, ed. Norman
N. Holland, Sidney Homan, and Bernard J. Paris (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1989), 152–3; Richard Wheeler, Shakespeare’s Development
and the Problem Comedies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981),
35–45. On the threatening aspect of service, see Dolan, Dangerous Familiars.
27. Susan Snyder, “All’s Well That Ends Well and Shakespeare’s Helens: Text and
Subtext, Subject and Object,” English Literary Renaissance 18, no. 1 (1988):
70–72; “Naming Names,” 271–2.
28. M. L. Wine, ed., The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham (London: Methuen,
1973), 8.104.
29. Robert Grams Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1965), 109–12; John F. Adams, “All’s Well That
Ends Well: The Paradox of Procreation,” Shakespeare Quarterly 12, no. 3
(1961): 261–70.
30. Adelman, “Bed Tricks,” 161–2; Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in
Shakespeare’s Plays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 58–104;
Richard Wheeler, Shakespeare’s Development, 35–91. See also Arthur C. Kirsch,
Shakespeare and the Experience of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981).
31. Snyder, “Naming Names,” 276–9.
32. All’s Well often dramatizes paradoxes and riddles, and the final scene is struc-
tured by setting up and solving the riddle of Diana, who insists that she is
both a maid and not a maid. Incidental riddles multiply: Parolles asserts that
Bertram loved “as a gentleman does a woman … He lov’d her, sir, and lov’d
her not” (5.3.243–6). These proliferating riddles take love and sexuality as
their subject and call attention to the tension between exploitative aspects
of sexual desire and Helena’s idealizing love.
33. “A Fayre Mayde of London,” “A Lamentable Ballad of the Ladies Fall,” “The
desperate Damsell’s Tragedy,” [H. G.], “The Tragedy of Phillis,” and “The
Wandering Prince of Troy,” in Chappell, ed., Roxburghe Ballads, 1.181–5,
6.764–5, 1.265–70, 2.608–10, 6.548–51.
34. On the cure of the King, see Catherine Field, “‘Sweet Practicer, Thy Physic
I Will Try’: Helena and her ‘Good Receipt’ in All’s Well, That Ends Well,” in
Waller, ed. New Critical Essays, 194–208; Kent Lehnhof, “Performing Woman:
Female Theatricality in All’s Well, That Ends Well,” ibid., 111–24.
35. For a discussion of other deferrals in the play, see Susan Snyder, “‘The
King’s Not Here’: Displacement and Deferral in All’s Well That Ends Well,”
Shakespeare Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1992): 20–32.
36. When Bertram’s letter rejecting Helena reaches Rossillion, the Clown again
anticipates the news with a parallel announcement. While the Countess
reads the letter, the Clown muses aloud that “I have no mind to Isbel since
I was at court” (2.2.11). We then hear that Bertram “has no mind to” Helena.
Noticing the Clown’s tendency to voice concerns that belong to other
characters, Susan Snyder has argued that the Clown is “a voice available
Notes 195
to say the unsayable, in his sexual aversion speaking for Bertram but in his
obsessive, driving desire speaking for Helen.” In my reading, the Clown’s
use of conventional genres such as the ballad and its attendant themes and
jokes suggests that his publication of other characters’ acts through debased
allegories is itself at issue. Snyder, “‘The King’s Not Here,’” 23.
37. Rollins hypothesized that this ballad was “The lamentations of Hecuba
and the ladies of Troye,” entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1586. See
G. K. Hunter’s note to 1.3.67–76. Hunter, ed., All’s Well That Ends Well, 3rd
edn. (London: Methuen, 1966). See also Peter J. Seng, The Vocal Songs in the
Plays of Shakespeare: A Critical History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1967), 177–8.
38. The Winter’s Tale, 4.4.
39. Lafew’s bawdy commentary and the folklore tradition of ascribing curative
properties to virginal sex have led critics and directors to interpret Helena’s
scene with the King as the prologue to a sexual encounter that restores
the King to sexual and general health. John Barton’s 1967 production at
Stratford-upon-Avon had Helena climb into the King’s bed; a 1980 BBC-
TV production ended this scene with a long kiss between Helena and the
King. See Barbara Hodgdon, “The Making of Virgins and Mothers: Sexual
Signs, Substitute Scenes and Doubled Presences in All’s Well That Ends Well,”
Philological Quarterly 66, no. 1 (1987): 47–72; J. L. Styan, All’s Well That Ends
Well (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 51–5.
40. See, for example, Adams, “Paradox of Procreation,” 261–70; Adelman, “Bed
Tricks,” 160–61; and Neely, Broken Nuptials, 65–70.
41. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s Problem Plays (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1949), 117.
42. A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki, eds., The Faerie
Queene (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001), 3.9.1–2. Mihoko Suzuki traces in
detail Britomart’s relation to Hellenore and to Florimell, another Helen of
Troy analogue, in Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 150–77.
43. Ibid., 168.
44. Helena deploys the heroic mode to combat the taint of social presumption
and waywardness suggested by the Clown and Lafew. However, as the play
progresses, Helena chooses new strategies; on winning Bertram in mar-
riage she proclaims a change of allegiance from “Diana’s altar” to “imperial
Love,” and on the failure of her scheme she seems to regret the heroic mode,
apologizing for acting as “vengeful Juno” and declaring herself now “Saint
Jacques’ pilgrim” (2.3.74–5; 3.4.4,13).
45. See also Richard A. Levin’s interpretation of Helena as an ambitious female
counterpart of Shakespeare himself. Levin, “Did Helena Have a Renaissance?”
English Studies 87, no. 1 (2006): 23–34.
46. Each of these romances was translated into English (most in several edi-
tions) during the sixteenth century. Montemayor’s Diana and Gil Polo’s
Enamoured Diana were published in Bartholomew Yong’s translation in 1598;
John Bourchier’s translation of Huon of Bordeaux appeared in two editions
by 1515 and again in 1601; John Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso
appeared in 1591, and books of the Amadis were translated by Anthony
Munday, Lazarus Pyott, and Thomas Paynell in 1572, 1590, 1595, and 1598.
196 Notes
On women warriors in these romances, see Winfried Schleiner, “Le feu

caché: Homosocial Bonds Between Women in a Renaissance Romance,”
Renaissance Quarterly 45, no. 2 (1992): 293–311; Alison Taufer, “The Only
Good Amazon Is a Converted Amazon: The Woman Warrior and Christianity
in the Amadis Cycle,” in Playing with Gender: A Renaissance Pursuit, ed. Jean
R. Brink, Maryanne C. Horowitz, and Allison P. Coudert (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1991), 35–52; Diane Watt, “Read My Lips: Clippyng and
Kyssyng in the Early Sixteenth Century,” in Queerly Phrased: Language,
Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Anna Livia and Kira Hall (New York: Oxford
47. On Helena and early modern theories of the power of the female imagina-
tion, see Caroline Bicks, “Planned Parenthood: Minding the Quick Woman
in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Modern Philology 103, no. 3 (2006): 299–331.
48. Susan Snyder analyzes the subtle changes in address between the Clown and
Parolles after Parolles’ fall. Snyder, “Naming Names,” 268–9.
49. Adelman, “Bed Tricks,” 159–62.
50. Ryan Kiernan, “‘Where Hope Is Coldest’: All’s Well That Ends Well,” in Ewan
Fernie, ed., Spiritual Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2005), 47.
51. See Adams, “The Paradox of Procreation,” 261–70; Hunter, Comedy of
Forgiveness, 110–11; David McCandless, “Helena’s Bed-Trick: Gender and
Performance in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994):
450–51; and Snyder, “Shakespeare’s Helens,” 67–8.
52. Tillyard answers this argument in Shakespeare’s Problem Plays, 103–04.
53. Snyder, “Shakespeare’s Helens,” 66–77.
54. It has been plausibly suggested that “monarch” here refers to Monarcho or
Monarch, a member of Queen’s Elizabeth’s retinue who thought himself
a king. Shakespeare mentions him more directly in Love’s Labor’s Lost as
“A Phantasme, a Monarcho, and one that makes sport / To the Prince and his
Booke-mates” (4.1.108–10). This allusion accords with my reading: Helena
and Parolles each mockingly accuse the other of delusions (or hopes) of
grandeur, and each disavows such delusions. Arthur Quiller-Couch and John
Dover Wilson, eds., All’s Well That Ends Well (Cambridge: University Press,
1929), note to 1.1.109; see also Horace Howard Furness, ed., Love’s Labour’s
Lost (1904; reprint New York: Dover Publications, 1964), note to 4.1.109.
55. For an alternative view of the parallels between Parolles and Helena, see
Jonathan Gil Harris, “All Swell That End Swell: Dropsy, Phantom Pregnancy,
and the Sound of Deconception in All’s Well That Ends Well,” Renaissance
Drama 35 (2006): 169–89.
56. For this sense of “to make,” see Iago’s remark in Othello: “This is the night /
That either makes me or fordoes me quite” (5.1.128–9). Later in All’s Well
Shakespeare uses the expression ironically regarding Bertram, who “hath
given [Diana] his monumental ring, and thinks himself made in the
unchaste composition” (4.3.17–18). Bertram is of course not made, but could
be socially ruined, by his liaison with an impoverished young woman. Plays
on the words “done” and “undone” also crop up throughout the play and
extend the theme of social rise and fall. Parolles’ ostentatiously numerous
and colorful scarves, emblems of his soldiership and his vanity, particularly
provoke such witticisms, as in the First Soldier’s “You are undone, captain –
all but your scarf; that has a knot on’t yet” (4.3.323–4).
Notes 197
57. Julie Crawford, “All’s Well That Ends Well: Or, Is Marriage Always Already
Heterosexual?” in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works
of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2011), 39–47.
58. The theme of rising through self-commodification reappears when the
Clown follows Helena and Parolles to the court, which puts him “to the
height of [his] breeding”; he declares that “if God have lent a man any
manners he may easily put it off at court” (2.2.1–2, 8–9). “Put it off” here
means “sell” as well as “take off.” See G. K. Hunter’s note to 2.2.9.
59. The French lords hope that Bertram will recognize Parolles’ fakery: “he
might take a measure of his own judgments wherein he so curiously had set
this counterfeit” (4.3.31–3). Bertram is ready to doubt Parolles even before
he is put to the test: “Come, bring forth this counterfeit module has deceiv’d
me like a double-meaning prophesier” (4.3.95–7).
60. Muriel C. Bradbrook, “Virtue Is the True Nobility: A Study of the Structure of
All’s Well That Ends Well,” Review of English Studies 1, no. 4 (1950): 289–301.
See also Adams, “The Paradox of Procreation”; Robert Hapgood, “The Life of
Shame: Parolles and All’s Well,” Essays in Criticism 15 (1965): 269–78.
61. Mary Ellen Lamb has given an instructive analysis of the early modern
imagination of power and erotic service. Lamb, “Tracing a Heterosexual
Erotics of Service in Twelfth Night and the Autobiographical Writings of
Thomas Whythorne and Anne Clifford,” Criticism 40, no. 1 (1998): 1–25.
62. G. K. Hunter glosses the “pudding to his skin” by comparing the proverb “as
fit as a pudding to the friar’s mouth.” However, the important connotation
here is phallic; as David Bevington points out, a gloss suitable for contem-
porary American audiences would be “a sausage to his skin.” Bevington,
“All’s Well that Plays Well,” in Subjects on the World’s Stage: Essays on British
Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. David G. Allen and Robert
A. White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 163.
63. The First Folio gives “huswife,” which may reinforce the sexual connota-
tion. OED, s.v. “housewife,” 1. “Often (with qualifying words) a woman
who manages her household with skill and thrift, a domestic economist”; 2.
“A light, worthless, or pert woman or girl. Usually “huswife,” now “hussy,”
q.v.”; s.v. “to housewife it,” “to act the housewife, to manage a household
with skill and thrift, to practice economy.” See also Mary Thomas Crane on
“housewife,” “huswife,” and “hussy.” Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with
Cognitive Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 44.
64. The comic motif of a beaten servant appears very often in English drama of
the 1580s and 1590s. The morality plays in which the Vice and his lieuten-
ants continually fall to blows combined with the New Comedy tradition
of the cunning servant to make the beating of servants a comic staple. On
the tradition of the Vice and the motif of physical violence and low-status
characters in Elizabethan drama, see David Bevington, From “Mankind”
to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 253–4.
65. See also Craig Dionne’s reading of this scene in “Playing It Accordingly:
Parolles and Shakespeare’s Knee-Crooking Knaves,” in Waller, ed., New
Critical Essays, 221–33.
66. For Parolles’ spreading of rumors, see 3.5.66–7.
198 Notes
67. OED, s.v. “cat,” 2b, “a prostitute”; 12b, “to turn the cat in the pan – To
change one’s position, change sides, from motives of interest, etc.”
68. Schalkwyk, “Love and Service in The Taming of the Shrew and All’s Well That
Ends Well,” Shakespearean International Yearbook 5 (2005): 26.
5 Marriage and Private Lament in Mary Wroth’s Urania

1. On Urania’s publication, see Josephine Roberts’ “Textual Introduction,” The
First Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (Binghamton, NY: Center for
Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1995), cv–cxx. All references to the
First Part will indicate this edition.
2. In a well-known letter to the Duke of Buckingham, Wroth stated that she
never intended to publish, but the claim is belied by the fact that she had
presented him with a copy of the book. See Josephine Roberts, “Lady Mary
Wroth’s Urania: A Response to Jacobean Censorship,” in New Ways of Looking
at Old Texts, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance
Texts and Studies, 1993), 125–9; Rosalind Smith, “Lady Mary Wroth’s
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: The Politics of Withdrawal,” English Literary
Renaissance 30, no. 3 (2000): 408–31.
3. Jeff Masten, “‘Shall I Turne Blabb?’ Circulation, Gender, and Subjectivity in
Wroth’s Sonnets,” in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early
Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press, 1991), 67–87; Nona Fienberg, “Mary Wroth and the
Invention of Female Poetic Subjectivity,” ibid., 175–90. Daniel Juan Gil
responds to Masten with a tightly argued reading of the poems showing
Wroth deliberately taking the status not of private subject, but of publicly
circulating object – a parodic violation of conventional authorship. Gil,
“The Currency of the Beloved and the Authority of Lady Mary Wroth,”
Modern Language Studies 29, no. 2 (1999): 73–92. See also Maureen Quilligan,
“The Constant Subject: Instability and Female Authority in Wroth’s Urania
Poems,” in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth Century
English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 307–35.
4. See also Helen Hackett, “‘A Book, and Solitariness’: Melancholia, Gender and
Literary Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Renaissance Configurations:
Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580–1690, ed. Gordon McMullan (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1998), 64–85.
5. For a comprehensive view of Wroth’s innovative approach to genre, see
Barbara Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1993), 243–308. On global geography in Urania,
see Sheila T. Cavanagh, Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of
Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001).
On Wroth’s use of texts from Iberian romances to medieval saints’ lives to
domestic chores, see Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English
Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 159–82.
6. Paul Salzman, “The Strang(e) Constructions of Mary Wroth’s Urania:
Arcadian Romance and the Public Realm,” in English Renaissance Prose: History,
Language, and Politics, ed. Neil Rhodes (Tempe: Arizona State University,
Notes 199
1997), 109–24; Salzman, Literary Culture in Jacobean England: Reading

1621 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 64–81; Ann Rosalind Jones,
“Designing Women: The Self as Spectacle in Mary Wroth and Veronica
Franco,” in Reading Mary Wroth, ed. Miller and Waller, 135–53. Nona
Fienberg discusses Wroth’s use of Protestant rhetoric, references to the
geographic and sociopolitical context of Kent, and Anne Cecil’s sonnets of
mourning. Fienberg, “Mary Wroth’s Poetics of the Self,” Studies in English
Literature 42, no. 1 (2002): 121–36.
7. Smith, “Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus.”
8. Similarly, Linda L. Dove argues that Wroth’s poetry plays on the analogy
between the family and the state in contemporary sociopolitical theory.
Dove, “Mary Wroth and the Politics of the Household in Pamphilia to
Amphilanthus,” in Burke et al., Women, Writing and the Reproduction of Culture,
141–56.
9. On pastoral in Urania, see Amelia Zurcher Sandy, “Pastoral, Temperance,
and the Unitary Self in Wroth’s Urania,” SEL Studies in English Literature,
1500–1900 42, no. 1 (2002): 103–19.
10. Similarly, Rebecca Laroche argues that Pamphilia to Amphilanthus fuses
aspects of Philip Sidney’s and Shakespeare’s sonnet sequences to create
new emotional complexities. Laroche, “Pamphilia Across a Crowded Room:
Mary Wroth’s Entry into Literary History,” Genre 30 (1997): 267–88.
11. Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing
and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1984), 159–202.
12. See Melissa E. Sanchez on marriage as an allegory for political sovereignty
and resistance in Wroth’s period. Sanchez, “The Politics of Masochism
in Mary Wroth’s Urania,” ELH 74, no. 2 (2007): 449–78. For other political
contexts, see Bernadette Andrea, “Pamphilia’s Cabinet: Gendered Authorship
and Empire in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania,” ELH 68, no. 2 (2001): 335–58.
13. Jennifer Lee Carrell goes further than this, arguing that Urania deconstructs
the distinction between truth and fiction, while Christina Luckyj argues that
Wroth used her autobiography in the service of both poetic imitation and
didactic moral criticism. Carrell, “A Pack of Lies in a Looking Glass: Lady
Mary Wroth’s Urania and the Magic Mirror of Romance,” Studies in English
Literature 34, no. 1 (1994): 79–107; Luckyj, “The Politics of Genre in Early
Women’s Writing: The Case of Lady Mary Wroth,” English Studies in Canada
27, no. 3 (2001): 253–82.
14. For a thorough biography, see Roberts’ introduction, Urania, lxxix–xcviii.
See also Lewalski, “Revising Genres.” On autobiographical aspects of Urania,
see Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Biopolitics of Romance in Mary Wroth’s The
Countess of Montgomery’s Urania,” English Literary Renaissance 31 (2001):
107–30; and Marion Wynne-Davies, “‘So Much Worth’: Autobiographical
Narratives in the Work of Lady Mary Wroth,” in Betraying Our Selves: Forms
of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts, ed. Henk Dragstra, Sheila
Ottway, and Helen Wilcox (New York: Macmillan-St. Martin’s, 2000),
76–93. Akiko Kusonoki usefully compares Wroth’s experience to other
extramarital liaisons in court circles: “Female Selfhood and Male Violence in
English Renaissance Drama: A View from Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Women,
Violence and English Renaissance Literature: Essays Honoring Paul Jorgensen, ed.
200 Notes
Linda Woodbridge and Sharon A. Beehler (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval
and Renaissance Studies, 2003), 126–48.
15. Gary F. Waller, The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and
the Early Modern Construction of Gender (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University
Press, 1993), 256. Similarly, Anne Shaver argues that Wroth’s verisimilar
fiction corrects the disappointments that she experienced at first hand. Shaver,
“Agency and Marriage in the Fictions of Lady Mary Wroth and Margaret
Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle,” Pilgrimage for Love: Essays in Early Modern
Literature in Honor of Josephine A. Roberts, ed. Sigrid King (Tempe: Arizona
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999) 177–90.
16. Mary Ellen Lamb points out the analogy between the sympathetic bond
created by lamenters and audiences within the text and that between Urania
and its readers. Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 178–81.
17. Louis A. Montrose, “Spenser’s Domestic Domain: Poetry, Property, and
the Early Modern Subject,” in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed.
Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge:
18. Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia and Piscatorial Eclogues, trans. Ralph Nash (Detroit,
MI: Wayne State University Press, 1966), 73.
19. On how Wroth draws on Philip Sidney’s works and Diana, see also Gavin
Alexander, Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney,
1586–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 283–331.
20. Judith M. Kennedy, ed., A Critical Edition of Yong’s Translation of George of
Montemayor’s Diana and Gil Polo’s Enamoured Diana, trans. Bartholomew
Yong (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 18–19. Further references to Diana
will be taken from this edition.
21. Wendy Wall discusses the voyeuristic reader as a convention of Petrarchan
poetry, which strongly influenced pastoral romance; in the late sixteenth
century, they may be considered parallel and mutually influential tradi-
tions. Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English
Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 169–226.
22. Jean Robertson, ed., The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia)
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 229.
23. Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée (1607–27), a pastoral romance in the same tradi-
tion as Diana and Sidney’s Arcadia, probably also influenced Wroth. Unlike
Sidney, Montemayor, and Polo, d’Urfé has little interest in women as poets,
and splits voyeuristic scenes involving women from eavesdropping scenes,
which focus on men. d’Urfé exposes the privacy of his male lovers when
they are overheard uttering love laments, but he exposes women’s bodies
rather than their poetry, using elaborate scenes in which men spy on women
undressing in feminine retreats.
24. See, for example, Diana’s confusion when her song is interrupted in Enamoured
Diana (247).
25. J. Davies and G. Havers, trans., Clélia: An Excellent New Romance (1678), pt. 2,
284. Quoted in Rosalind Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction
from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 62.
26. Alexander B. Grosart, ed., The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Samuel
Daniel, vol. 1 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), 81, line 3.
Notes 201
27. This text prefaces the verses in the 1587 edition. Lily B. Campbell, ed., The
Mirror for Magistrates (1938; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960), 372.
28. See Mary Jo Kietzman on the female complaint as “a tool of poetic
self-definition in the English tradition since the fourteenth century.”
Kietzman, “‘What is Hecuba to Him or [S]he to Hecuba?’ Lucrece’s
Complaint and Shakespearean Poetic Agency,” Modern Philology 97, no. 1
(1999): 25.
29. On the influence of Diana on Urania, see Sharon Rose Yang, “The Sage
Felicia and the Grave Melissea: Diana of George of Montemayor, an Inspiration
for Wroth’s Defense of Women in Urania,” ANQ 16, no. 2 (2003): 5–14. On
modesty in Urania, see Jacqueline T. Miller, “Ladies of the Oddest Passion:
Early Modern Women and the Arts of Discretion,” Modern Philology 103,
no. 4 (2006): 453–73.
30. See also Helen Hackett’s analysis of voyeurism in Urania, which focuses on
Wroth’s use of women’s bodies in erotic display. “‘Yet Tell Me Some Such
Fiction’: Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and the ‘Femininity’ of Romance,” in
Early Women Writers: 1600–1720, ed. Anita Pacheco (London: Longman,
1998), 45–69.
31. The opposition between domesticity and adventure often structures chiv-
alric romance, most obviously in Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec et Enide and Le
Chevalier au Lion, in which married knights are derided for their domestic
complaisance, and must leave the household to regain heroic stature. Sir
Thomas Malory has Lancelot abjure marriage, for “to be a wedded man …
thenne I must couche with her, and leve arms and turnementys, batayls,
and adventures.” James W. Spisak, ed., Caxton’s Malory: A New Edition of Sir
Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1983), 6:10.
32. Lady Mary Wroth, The Second Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania,
ed. Josephine Roberts, Suzanne Gossett, and Janel Mueller (Tempe, AZ:
Renaissance English Text Society, 1999), 117.
33. Pamphilia’s favorite bower is such a place, where “the tops of trees joyning
so close, as if in love with each other, could not but affectionatly embrace”
(1.91).
34. Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1979), 101–13.
35. Similarly, Gary Waller argues that Wroth’s heroines’ seeking out of private
spaces to produce verse laments indicates Wroth’s own weariness with the
constant surveillance characteristic of the household. Waller, Sidney Family
Romance, 277–9.
36. Steriamus’ sighting of Pastora on a rock, combing her hair, evokes the
mermaids who were supposed to be fatal seducers of sailors. Ironically,
Pastora’s song signifies her self-sufficiency rather than a predatory sexuality,
and her image is designed to prompt admiring sympathy rather than lust.
I am indebted to an anonymous reader for making this connection. See also
Sandy, “Pastoral, Temperance, and the Unitary Self.”
37. The lovers met at the house of her great friend, Silvarina, a woman involved
in her own extramarital liaison with her cousin. The two heroines become
indistinguishable: Pastora is the lamenting lover whom Steriamus meets, but
the island is bestowed on Silvarina. As Pastora and Silvarina merge, so do
202 Notes
the fates of all Wroth’s wives, into one narrative of social exposure and exile
from the household.
38. Ann Rosalind Jones finds the same logic of spectacle in Pamphilia to
Amphilanthus, the sonnet sequence closing Urania: “This claim to the status
of martyr positions Pamphilia as public sign, pointing to the cruelty of her
oppressors. The woman calls upon the gaze of a public to make a case for
her innocence and merit, and she invokes a tragic setting to reinforce that
innocence through direct, even aggressive control of audience perspective.”
Jones, “Designing Women,” 150.
39. On Wroth’s representation of intimacy among women, see Naomi J. Miller,
who argues that she creates a new genre of feminine romance. Jacqueline
T. Miller argues that Wroth depicts emotions’ origins in such intersubjective
moments; authentic passion erupts through imitation of another’s passion,
thus blurring the border between self and other. Jacqueline T. Miller, “The
Passion Signified: Imitation and the Construction of Emotions in Sidney and
Wroth,” Criticism 43, no. 4 (2001): 407–21; Naomi J. Miller, “Engendering
Discourse: Women’s Voices in Wroth’s Urania and Shakespeare’s Plays,”
Reading Mary Wroth, 154–72; and Naomi J. Miller, Changing the Subject:
Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1996).
40. On the popularity of chivalric romance, as well as its critical reception,
see R. S. Crane, The Vogue of Medieval Chivalric Romance During the English
Renaissance (Menasha, WI: George Banta Publishing Company, 1919). For
more recent studies, see Anne Falke, “‘The Work Well Done that Pleaseth
All’: Emanuel Forde and the Seventeenth-Century Popular Romance,” Studies
in Philology 78, no. 3 (1981): 241–54; Lorna Hutson, “Chivalry for Merchants,
Or, Knights of Temperance in the Realms of Gold,” Journal of Medieval and
Renaissance Studies 26, no. 1 (1996): 29–59.
41. Critics have pointed out, however, that the Amadis romances show greater
interest in constant love and near-marriages than do medieval Arthurian
romances. See Marian Rothstein, “Clandestine Marriage and Amadis de
Gaule: The Text, the World, and the Reader,” Sixteenth Century Journal 25,
no. 4 (1994): 873–86; Harry Sieber, “The Romance of Chivalry in Spain: From
Rodríguez de Montalvo to Cervantes,” in Romance: Generic Transformation
from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis
Brownlee (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985), 203–19.
42. See, for example, Robertson, ed., Old Arcadia, 48, 91ff, and 122f.
43. Spisak, ed., Caxton’s Malory, 8:31.
44. Wroth’s depictions of adulterous privacy contrast with the representa-
tion of rape as an invasion of a woman’s bedchamber in works such as
The Rape of Lucrece and Cymbeline. See Georgianna Ziegler, “My Lady’s
Chamber: Female Space, Female Chastity in Shakespeare,” Textual Practice 4
(1990): 73–90. On Wroth’s use of architectural space to figure the self, see
Shannon Miller, “Constructing the Female Self: Architectural Structures in
Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia
Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1999), 139–59. On domestic spaces and female homosociality, see Laurie
J. Shannon, “Emilia’s Argument: Friendship and ‘Human Title’ in The Two
Noble Kinsmen,” ELH 64, no. 3 (1997): 657–82.
Notes 203
45. See Helen Hackett, “The Torture of Limena: Sex and Violence in Lady Mary
Wroth’s Urania,” in Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern
Writing, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen, and Suzanne Trill (Pittsburgh,
PA: Duquesne University Press, 1997), 93–110; Jacqueline T. Miller, “Lady
Mary Wroth in the House of Busirane,” Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in
the Early Modern Age, ed. Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 115–24; and Shannon Miller, “‘Mirrours
More Then One’: Edmund Spenser and Female Authority in the Seventeenth
Century,” in ibid., 125–47.
46. On the locus amoenus as erotic setting in Amadis of Gaul and Don Quixote,
see Alfred Rodriguez and Joel F. Dykstra, “Cervantes’s Parodic Rendering of
a Traditional Topos: Locus Amoenus,” Cervantes 17 (1997): 115–21.
47. Chivalric romance features such hidden lovers as well: in the Morte D’Arthur,
Tristan brings his beloved Isolde home to marry King Mark, and is later
established as her lover in a secret turret in the castle (9:17). Chrétien de
Troyes’ Cligès also creates a domestic love nest under his beloved’s husband’s
nose in a castle camouflaged by quasi-magical craft.
48. So Dorolina responds when Pamphilia tells the “French Story” of Lindamira’s
betrayal, 1.505.
49. In one case Wroth’s description of happy marriage is so hyperbolic as to
seem defensive: she writes that Parismeria and his beloved live “in the rarest
parfectiones of their constan[cy] and with out any instant of beeing neer the
feeling of any kinde of a little clowde of the thing mistaking” (2.317).
50. See Lewalski, “Revising Genres,” 1993.
51. See Richard Helgerson, Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early
Modern European Drama and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000),
79–119. Mary Ellen Lamb emphasizes the signs of wealth in this scene,
which further eroticize Dalinea’s domesticity. Lamb, “Women Readers
in Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Reading Mary Wroth, ed. Miller and Waller,
210–27.
52. Paul Salzman argues that this contrast between romantic male pursuits and
pastoral female pursuits structures gender and genre in Urania. Salzman,
“The Strang(e) Constructions of Mary Wroth’s Urania: Arcadian Romance
and the Public Realm,” in English Renaissance Prose: History, Language, and
Politics, ed. Neil Rhodes (Tempe: Arizona State University Press, 1997),
109–24.
53. Similarly, Lena Cowen Orlin finds that the household in marriage advice
tracts is a “contested space” due to its conflicting associations with each
sex; while it is a “woman’s place,” on the other hand “a man’s house is his
castle.” Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture, 102–03.
54. See Roberts, “Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania.”
55. On Wroth as a late romance demonstrating “psychological and down-to-
earth elements” anticipating the early novel, see Janet Todd, The Sign of
Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660–1800 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1989), 46–8. On the popularity of French heroic romance
in England from the Protectorate through to the reign of Charles II, see
Charlotte E. Morgan, The Rise in the Novel of Manners: A Study of English Prose
Fiction Between 1600 and 1740 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911),
27–37.
204 Notes
56. Wroth’s publicly illicit lovers, like the Lady Angler, thus represent a conscious
refusal to split a character’s subjectivity between lover and wife.
57. Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 71–93.
58. On Ovid’s Heroides and the early novel, see Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho,
1546–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 43–115.
59. The central opposition between private experience and public expression
in amatory letters is registered by the long-standing critical debate that,
as Linda Kauffman writes, posits of Les Lettres Portugaises that “they are a
work either of conscious calculation or of natural genius; they rely either
on artifice or on the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Kauffman,
Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
60. On Les Lettres Portugaises in England, see Robert Adams Day, Told in Letters:
Epistolary Fiction Before Richardson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1966), 27–47.
61. Guilleragues, Five Love-Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier (1678), in The Novel in
Letters: Epistolary Fiction in the Early English Novel, 1678–1740, ed. Natascha
Würzbach (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1969), 14.
62. Linda Kauffman argues, similarly, that Mariane’s goal in writing is to
maintain her passion, not to regain its object. Kauffman, Discourses of
Desire, 114.
63. On Les Lettres Portugaises and Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman
and His Sister, see Ros Ballaster, “Love-Letters: Engendering Desire,” in Aphra
Behn, ed. Janet Todd (London: Macmillan Press, 1999), 143–57.
64. [Madame de Lafayette], The Princess of Cleves, 1679, 210.
65. See also Dorothy Kelly, Telling Glances: Voyeurism in the French Novel
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 192–221.
66. Aphra Behn, Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–87), in
The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd (London: William Pickering, 1993),
2:174.
67. On this episode, see Toni Bowers, Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and
the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011),
103–38; Susan Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics
in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006),
349–59.
68. On Behn’s “interweaving of sexual and political narratives,” see Ellen Pollak,
“Beyond Incest: Gender and the Politics of Transgression in Aphra Behn’s
Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister,” in Rereading Aphra Behn:
History, Theory and Criticism, ed. Heidi Hutner (Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia, 1993), 15–66.
69. Sylvia has a predatory aspect reminiscent of Wroth’s “devouring throats” –
women who dominate and imprison men. However, Sylvia’s sexual power
over men has distinct limits, and she is more complex than Wroth’s antiher-
oines. On the theme of voracious women in Behn, see Jacqueline Pearson,
“Gender and Narrative in the Fiction of Aphra Behn,” Review of English
Studies 42, no. 165 (1991): 165–90.
70. The narrator has just described Philander contemplating suicide at the
prospect of leaving Sylvia to flee prosecution; he only holds himself back
Notes 205
from self-destruction, we are told, by the thought that his loss would mean
Sylvia’s ruin.
71. Janet Todd, “Love-Letters and Critical History,” in Aphra Behn (1640–1689):
Le Modèle Européen, ed. Mary Ann O’Donnell, Bernard Dhuicq, and Bernard
Bosredon (Entrevaux, France: Bilingua GA Editions, 2005), 198.
6 Interest and Retirement in Aphra Behn’s Odes

1. Jacqueline Pearson, The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women
Dramatists, 1642–1737 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); Janet M. Todd,
The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London:
Virago, 1989).
2. Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the
Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 87.
3. For a critique of this view, see Derek Hughes, The Theatre of Aphra Behn
(London: Palgrave, 2001). See also Danielle Bobker, “Behn: Auth-Whore or
Writer? Authorship and Identity in The Rover,” Restoration and 18th Century
Theatre Research 11, no. 1 (1996): 32–9.
4. “To Mrs. Wharton,” in Edward Young, The Idea of Christian Love, Being a
Translation, at the Instance of Mr. Waller, of a Latin Sermon, 1688, vii–viii.
See also Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
5. On the “spectacle of the undressed body” in Behn’s plays, see Gallagher,
Nobody’s Story, 32.
6. “The visitt,” in Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts, 257–8.
7. Montague Summers, ed., The Works of Aphra Behn, 6 vols. (London:
W. Heinemann, 1915), 6:119–21. On Creech’s praise of Behn, see Robert
A. Erickson, “The Generous Heart: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, and the Woman
Writer,” in The Language of the Heart, 1600–1750 (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 147–84.
8. Janet Todd, ed. The Works of Aphra Behn, 7 vols. (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1992–96), 6:303. All references to Behn’s works draw on
this edition.
9. See Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments
for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1997), 31–7.
10. See, for example, Marchamont Nedham, Interest Will Not Lie, Or a View of
England’s True Interest (1659).
11. Albert O. Hirschman, Rival Views of Market Society and Other Recent Essays
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 36. See also Hirschman,
The Passions and the Interests; Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).
12. Todd, Works, 4:11.
13. Line Cottegnies argues that, despite the theological bent of Behn’s preface,
she avoids allusions to Christianity to create a text more skeptical than the
original. Cottegnies, “‘Aphra Behn Unmasqued’: A. Behn’s Translation of
La Rochefoucauld’s Réflexions,” in Aphra Behn (1640–1689), ed. O’Donnell
et al., 13–24. See also Cottegnies, “Aphra Behn’s French Translations,”
206 Notes
in The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, ed. Derek Hughes and Janet Todd
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 221–34.
14. In a related argument, Ros Ballaster distinguishes between economic and
political interest as motives for women’s authorship and surmises that Behn
may have preferred to represent herself as a promoter of her own economic
interest rather than as the agent of a political interest. Ballaster, “Seizing
the Means of Seduction: Fiction and Feminine Identity in Aphra Behn
and Delarivier Manley,” in Women, Writing, History, 1640–1740, ed. Isobel
Grundy and Susan Wiseman (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992),
93–108.
15. Todd, Works, vol. 5.
16. For examples, see The Roundheads (1681), The City Heiress (1682), and The
Widow Ranter (1689).
17. Todd, Works, 2:46.
18. Zook argues that the aesthetics of the royalist cause is more immediately
apparent in Behn’s work than is her investment in its political or libertine
philosophy. Behn criticized the callous pursuit of pleasure exemplified by
Wilmore in The Rover, but frequently endorsed the manner associated with
Cavalier poetry: witty, loyal to aristocratic values, and casually graceful.
Melinda S. Zook, “The Political Poetry of Aphra Behn,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Aphra Behn, ed. Hughes, 47.
19. Warren L. Chernaik, The Poetry of Limitation: A Study of Edmund Waller
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968); Earl Roy Miner, The Cavalier
Mode from Jonson to Cotton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971).
On the notion of royalist poetry as a political “diversion,” see Joshua
Scodel, “The Cowleyan Pindaric Ode and Sublime Diversions,” in A Nation
Transformed: England after the Restoration, ed. Alan Craig Houston and Steven
C. A. Pincus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 180–210.
20. Raymond A. Anselment, Loyalist Resolve: Patient Fortitude in the English Civil
War (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1988); Erma Kelly, “‘Small
Types of Great Ones’: Richard Lovelace’s Separate Peace,” in The English
Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry
Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 81–101.
21. Cyril Hackett Wilkinson, ed., The Poems of Richard Lovelace (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1930), 38–40.
22. Thomas N. Corns, “Marvell, Lovelace, and Cowley,” in Uncloistered Virtue:
English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992),
221–68.
23. Chernaik, Poetry of Limitation, 61.
24. Wilkinson, Poems of Richard Lovelace, 107–18.
25. Anselment, Loyalist Resolve; James Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English
Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); Alan
Rudrum, “Royalist Lyric,” in The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the
English Revolution, ed. N. H. Keeble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 181–97.
26. George Thorn-Drury, ed., The Poems of Edmund Waller (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1968), 133.
27. Quoted in Loxley, Royalism and Poetry, 209. Behn used this trope of
cowardly wisdom in her prologue to The False Count, quoted above, where
Notes 207
she pretends that, “wisely valluing her dear interest,” she has converted to
Whiggery.
28. Corns, “Marvell, Lovelace, and Cowley”; Kelly, “‘Small Types of Great
Ones’”; Loxley, Royalism and Poetry.
29. Paul H. Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1980), 5. Perhaps the studied grandeur of Behn’s Pindaric
odes has inhibited critical scholarship, which has focused more on her
purely erotic and pastoral lyrics. For exceptions, see Jennie Donald, “The
Male Monarch and the Female Poet: Poetic Authority in the Political Poetry
of Aphra Behn and Anne Finch,” in O’Donnell, ed., Aphra Behn, 77–84;
Susannah Quinsee, “Aphra Behn and the Male Muse,” ibid., 203–13; Stella
P. Revard, “Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and the Female Pindaric,”
Representing Women in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-
Larry Pebworth (University of Missouri Press, 1997), 227–41; Paul Salzman,
“Aphra Behn: Poetry and Masquerade,” in Aphra Behn Studies, ed. Janet Todd
(Cambridge University Press, 1996), 109–29; Scodel, “Cowleyan Pindaric
Ode”; Zook, “Political Poetry.”
30. Janet Todd, “Behn, Aphra (1640?–1689)”, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), online edn., http://dx.doi.
org/10.1093/ref:odnb/1961, accessed December 10, 2012.
31. Todd, Works, 3:88. Elliott Visconsi aptly describes the narrator’s pleasure in
Oroonoko’s beauty as fetishistic. Visconsi, Lines of Equity: Literature and the
Origins of Law in Later Stuart England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2008), 165.
32. There are exceptions; for example, Behn produces a more traditional medi-
tation on pastoral seclusion in “To Mrs. Price,” in which she is the speaker
extolling the pleasures of the country and urging her friend (probably the
actress Emily Price) to leave the “hated Town.” This poem praises erotic
privacy but avoids the language of heroism that Behn consistently associates
with the aristocracy.
33. Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 145–96. See also Scodel,
“Cowleyan Pindaric Ode,” 200–02.
34. Todd, Works, 7:120.
35. Ibid., 1:281–4.
36. Peter Hughes, “Wars within Doors: Erotic Heroism in Eighteenth-Century
Literature,” in The English Hero, 1660–1800, ed. Robert Folkenflik (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 1982), 168–94.
37. James Grantham Turner, “The Properties of Libertinism,” Eighteenth-Century
Life 9, n. s. 3 (1985): 75–87.
38. Robin Clifton, “Monck, Christopher, second Duke of Albemarle (1653–1688),”
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), online
edn., http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/18938, accessed December 10, 2012.
39. Zook, “Political Poetry.”
40. On the more sympathetic notes in these poems on Monmouth, see Zook,
“Political Poetry.”
41. Clifton, “Monck, Christopher.”
42. Todd, Works, 1:35–9.
43. Ibid., 1:386. See also Quinsee, “Aphra Behn and the Male Muse.”
208 Notes
44. Messenger, Pastoral Tradition and the Female Talent: Studies in Augustan Poetry
(New York: AMS Press, 2001), 33–4.
45. Heidi Laudien argues that the nurturing capacity of Nature in Behn’s
pastoral poems derives from Theocritus. Laudien, “Ladies of the Shade:
The Pastoral Poetry of Aphra Behn and Elizabeth Singer Rowe,” in The
Female Wits: Women and Gender in Restoration Literature and Culture, ed.
Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, Zenón Luis-Martínez, and Juan A. Prieto-Pablos
(Huelva: Universidad de Huelva, 2006). For Behn’s linkage of erotic heroism
and creativity in her poem on Thomas Creech, translator of Lucretius, see
Alvin Snider, “Atoms and Seeds: Aphra Behn’s Lucretius,” CLIO: A Journal of
Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 33, no. 1 (2003): 1–24. Robert
A. Erickson argues that she draws on Lucretius to invest femininity with
creative power. Erickson, The Language of the Heart, 1600–1750 (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 147–84.
46. See also Gallagher on masking. Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, 22.
47. Todd, Works, 1:289–90, ll. 25–39. All quotations from Behn’s lyric poetry are
taken from this volume.
48. Moreover, Behn integrates James’s erotic nature into his responsibilities as
a martial leader, claiming that “His Captives proudly their soft Fetters bear, /
And charm’d to an excess, / Adore the wonders they beheld” (188–90).
49. Here she writes in the spirit of Pindar, whose odes use praise of a hero
to reflect on topics including his own authorship and the glory of poetic
achievement.
50. While d’Urfé exhibits the natural nobility of his shepherds, English pastoral
romances, such as Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia and
Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, differentiate between
bumptious rustics and gracious nobility in disguise.
51. Todd, Secret Life, 85–114.
52. On Behn’s subtle criticism of the new regime here and in her ode to
Dr. Burnet, see Stella P. Revard, Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700
(Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2008),
169–76.
53. Melinda Zook notes that Behn’s praise of Mary here is more muted than her
praise of Mary of Modena in the odes on the coronation and the birth of
Prince James. Zook, “Political Poetry,” 60–61.
54. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 7.
7 Epilogue: Performing Privacy on Facebook

1. Stanley I. Benn, “Privacy, Freedom, and Respect for Persons,” in Philosophical
Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology, ed. Ferdinand David Schoeman
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 223–44; 227.
2. Ferdinand David Schoeman, Privacy and Social Freedom (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 13. See also Julie C. Inness, Privacy,
Intimacy, and Isolation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 106.
3. Quoted in David Sarno, “There’s Little Privacy in a Digital World,” Los Angeles
Times, Oct. 1, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/01/business/la-fi-
no-privacy-20111002, accessed December 10, 2012.
Notes 209
4. “Statistics,” Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics,

5. Quoted in Andy Greenberg, “Facebook’s Overblown Privacy Problems,”
Forbes, December 5, 2007, http://www.forbes.com/2007/12/05/facebook-
beacon-opt-tech-internet-cx_ag_1205techfacebook.html, accessed December
10, 2012.
6. “Data Use Policy,” Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/full_data_use_policy,
7. “Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says Privacy No Longer A ‘Social Norm,’” Huffington
Post, March 18, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/11/facebooks-
zuckerberg-the_n_417969.html, accessed January 24, 2012.
8. Federal Trade Commission, “Facebook Settles FTC Charges That It Deceived
Consumers By Failing To Keep Privacy Promises,” Press Release, November 29,
2011.
9. Leslie K. John, Alessandro Acquisti, and George Loewenstein, “Strangers on
a Plane: Context-Dependent Willingness to Divulge Sensitive Information,”
Journal of Consumer Research 37, no. 5 (2011): 858–73. See also M. Ryan Calo,
“Privacy’s Broken Windows: An Invitation to Professor Abril,” Wake Forest Law
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Index
Note: Page references in bold refer to figures; “n” after a page reference refers to
a note number on that page.
access, 9, 25–6, 53, 64, 76, 78–9, 81, Berlant, Lauren, 5, 8, 17

83 books of hours, see primers
Adams, John, 147 Bradbrook, Muriel, 106
Adams, Robert, 97 Brooke, Christopher, 93
Adelman, Janet, 97, 104 Browne, Anthony Maria, second
adultery, 112–44 Viscount Montagu, 60, 63, 68,
affects, see shame 69–76
ambition, 16–17, 25, 91–3, 96–106, Browne, Anthony, first Viscount
109–11, 159–61, 195 n. 45, Montagu, 67–8
196 n. 56 building, see architecture
Anselment, Raymond, 154 Butterworth, Charles, 41
architecture, 8, 52, 64–5, 188 n. 34,
188 n. 40, 190 n. 73 Calvin, John, 15, 26, 28–9, 35–7,
and privacy, 202 n. 44 38–40, 50–1, 184 n. 30
Arendt, Hannah, 2, 7 Charles I, King of England, 80–3
Aristotle, 6–7 Charles II, King of England, 151, 160
Athanasius, 21 Chernaik, Warren L., 153
Attwood, William, 146–7 Churchyard, Thomas, 118–19
Augustine of Hippo, 41 Cicero, 6–7
authenticity, 6, 7, 14, 113, 122, 157, closets, 9, 53, 81, 180 n. 27, 181 n. 1,
167, 204 n. 59 186 n. 5
authority, 14, 55–7, 68, 75–6, 79–83 Coleman, Morgan, 54–5, 56, 66
authorship, 84–5, 160, 164–5, 167, Coles, Kimberly, 44
175, 178 n. 2, 198 n. 3, 206 n. 14 Coligny, Gaspard II de, admiral of
and affect, 30–1 France, 71, 72
and authority, 54–7, 79–80, 82–3 commodification, 105–6, 145, 148–9,
and publicity, 1–3, 14, 17–18, 197 n. 58
112–113, 115–19, 145–7, 155 complaints, see laments
sexual connotations, 92, 122, Compton, Lady Elizabeth, 79
145–9 Cooper, John, 147
Coppola, Francis Ford, 172
ballads, 3, 16, 84–94, 99–103, 107, Costley, Clare, 41
110, 118, 191 n. 7 counterpublics, 2, 11–12, 14, 19
Bathsheba, 22, 41–9, 43, 45–6 courtesy, 13, 15–16, 54, 60, 62–4
Behn, Aphra, 14, 17–18, 140–4, courtesy literature, 62
145–71 Cowley, Abraham, 152, 155
Beilin, Elaine, 13 Cranfield, Lionel, first Earl of
Benn, Stanley I., 172, 174 Middlesex, 54, 56, 66
Berger, Henry, Jr., 62 Crawford, Julie, 106
Berkeley, Lady Jane, 76–80 Creech, Thomas, 147–8
228
Index 229
d’Urfé, Honoré, 166, 200 n. 23 novels, pastoral, primers, romance

Daniel, Samuel, 86, 91–2, 118 genre, odes, satire
Davenant, William, 157 Gillespie, Katharine, 14
David, King of Israel, 22, 41–9, 43, Gray, Catharine, 14
45–6, 182 n. 6 Greene, Roland, 37–8
de Bèze, Théodore, 41 Grosseteste, Robert, Bishop of
DeJean, Joan, 137 Lincoln, 59, 64
Dering, Edward, 23, 51 Guilleragues, Gabriel Joseph de
dishonor, see honor Lavergne, vicomte de, 137
display, see spectacle
domesticity, see households Habermas, Jürgen, 10–11, 170
Drayton, Michael, 91–2 Hamlin, Hannibal, 48
Dryden, John, 157 Hastings, Elizabeth (née Stanley),
Dubrow, Heather, 13 Countess of Huntingdon, 57
Duval, Marc, 71 Hastings, Henry, fifth Earl of
Huntingdon, 57, 61
eavesdropping, see overhearing Helen of Troy, 86, 90, 92, 94, 96–7,
Edward IV, King of England, 58 100
Egerton, John, second Earl of Henrietta Maria, Queen of England,
Bridgewater, 57 80–3
Elderton, William, 89–90 Henry VIII, King of England, 53
exile, 22–4, 50, 124–7, 152, 201 n. 37 Henry, Prince of Wales, 63, 64–5
exposure, 4, 11, 15–17, 19, 28, 30–5, heroism, 18, 71–2, 84, 96–7, 102–4,
40, 48–9, 85–6, 89–96, 99, 101–4, 106, 131–6, 156–71, 195 n. 44,
110–11, 114–27, 141 201 n. 31
hierarchy, 10–11, 15, 18, 21, 25,
Facebook, 172–7 59–62, 75, 98, 107–11
fallen women, see honor, fame Hirschman, Albert O., 149
fame, 84–6, 89–93, 99–102 Hobbes, Thomas, 149
familiarity, see intimacy honor, 53, 70–1, 74–5, 79, 86–92, 96,
Fane, Mildmay, 152 99–102, 106–11, 124
feminist theory, 11–14 see also exposure, fame
feudalism, 18, 63–5, 70, 151 compare shame
Fienberg, Nona, 113 Hoskins, W. G., 78
form, 3–5, 12, 15, 179 n. 11, household orders, 15–16, 52–83,
206 n. 18 186 n. 8
see also genre see also households
Fraser, Nancy, 2, 11–12 households, 3, 8–11, 13–17, 52–83,
freedom, 1, 7–9, 25–6, 28–9, 31, 52–3, 94–5, 104–11, 113–15, 120, 130,
63, 80, 102, 120–22, 124, 139–40, 134–5, 139–44
173–5 and political theory, 6–7, 199 n. 8
Fry, Paul, 155 and surveillance, 101, 123–5, 201
Fumerton, Patricia, 53 n. 35
see also masters, servants
Gallagher, Catherine, 145 Howard, William, Viscount Stafford,
genre, 3–4, 6, 24, 54, 85–7, 93, 167–9
113–14, 156, 194 n. 36 Hughes, Peter, 157
see also ballads, Book of Psalms, Hunter, Robert Grams, 97
courtesy literature, laments, husbands, see marriage
230 Index
interest, 9–10, 17–18, 145–71 Mary Sackville (née Compton),

internet, 172–7 Countess of Dorset, 167
intimacy, 5–6, 7–8, 10–12, 15–17, 28, Masten, Jeff, 113
32, 36, 59, 69–71, 78–9, 108, 124, masters, 15–16, 52, 54–5, 57–9, 61–4,
137, 139–40, 173–5 70, 74, 76–80, 82–3, 94–7,
with God, 15, 21–2, 25–6 107–11, 193 n. 26
and poetry, 116, 202 n. 39 see also households, servants
among women, 126, 202 n. 39 McClure, David, 174
Mertes, Kate, 65
James II, King of England, 163, 169 Messenger, Ann, 160–1
Jerusalem, the new, 50–1 Mill, John Stuart, 172–3
Jones, Ann Rosalind, 113 miniatures, portrait, 16, 66–73, 189
n. 53
Kerrigan, John, 86 modesty, 117, 121, 123, 125, 140–4
Kiernan, Ryan, 104 see also honor
Knox, John, 15, 22, 25–30, 38–9 Monck, Christopher, Duke of
Albemarle, 159–60
La Chapelle-Bessé, Henri de, 150 Montemayor, Jorge de, 115–17
La Rochefoucauld, François de, Montrose, Louis, 115
149–50, 157 Mountain, George, Archbishop of
Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine de, York, 56
(Madame de Lafayette), 138–40
laments, 5–6, 15, 16–17, 23–50, Neely, Carol Thomas, 97
86–7, 90–3, 96–7, 114–27, 128, New Historicism, 12
139–44 notoriety, see fame
Landes, Joan, 11 novels, epistolary, 136–44
liberty, see freedom
Lipking, Lawrence, 5 odes, 152–71, 207 n. 29, 208 n. 49
loca amoena, 120–31, 140–44 Oliver, Isaac, 66–73
Lock, Anne, 6, 10, 14, 15, 20–51 Ong, Walter, 87
Love, Harold, 1 Orlin, Lena Cowen, 8, 52
Lovelace, Richard, 152–3 Otway, Thomas, 157
Loxley, James, 154 overhearing, 3–6, 17, 30, 54, 112–44
Ovid, 86, 137
MacDonnell, Katherine (née
Manners), Duchess of Parker, Patricia A., 37, 123
Buckingham, 56–7, 66 pastoral, 5, 17, 113–14, 118–19, 125,
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 149–50 128, 134, 141–2, 153–71, 207 n.
Malory, Sir Thomas, 129 32, 208 n. 50
Mandeville, Bernard, 150 Patterson, Annabel, 114
markets, 5–9, 18, 145, 148–52, 157 Pearson, Jacqueline, 145
marriage, 9–10, 17, 62, 76–7, 80–3, Percy, Henry Algernon, fifth Earl of
97–9, 103, 105–6, 112–44, 173–4, Northumberland, 59
201 n. 31, 201 n. 37, 202 n. 41 performance, 1, 4–5, 8–12, 14–16,
see also adultery 18–21, 53–4, 63–4, 70, 76, 78,
Mary II, Queen of England, 163, 80–3, 86, 95, 99, 107, 115–27,
169–70 172–7
Mary of Modena, Queen of England, see also exposure, fame
163–6 Petrarchanism, 47, 96, 113, 164
Index 231
Plato, 6–7 All’s Well That Ends Well, 3, 10,

Polo, Gil, 115–17 16–17, 84–6, 93–111
popularity, see fame Shalkwyk, David, 111
primers, 41–4 shame, 15, 17, 22, 28–35, 44, 48, 85,
privacy 91–3, 97–100, 104–11, 117, 119,
definition, 3, 6–10 125, 131
and the household, 8–11 see also honor, fame
see also access, closets, intimacy, Sheba, Queen of, 58
modesty, overhearing, Shore, Jane, 91, 117–19
voyeurism Sidney, Robert, second Earl of
Psalms, Book of, 6, 15, 20–51, Leicester, 65
183 n. 18 Sidney, Sir Philip, 115–18, 128–29,
public roles, see performance 178 n. 7
publicity sin, 22, 24, 27–41, 44, 48–9,
definition of “public,” 3 185 n. 48
“intimate publics,” 5, 17 Smith, Rosalind, 44, 113
public speech, 4 Smyth, John, of Nibley, 77
see also counterpublics, exposure, Snyder, Susan, 86, 96
performance, surveillance social rising, see ambition
Solomon, King of Israel, 58
Questier, Michael, 73–4 spectacle, 5, 6, 9, 18, 85, 90, 100,
119–121, 162, 170, 202 n. 38
retirement, 17–18, 53, 64, 69, 78, Spenser, Edmund, 115, 120, 123, 130,
83, 113, 115, 119–36, 137, 140, 135
145–71 Stafford, John, 167–9
retreat, see retirement Stewart, Alan, 53
Ringley, Jennifer, 174 Stone, Lawrence, 10, 65, 77
Roberts, Josephine, 113 Strong, Roy, 70
Rohan, Henri duc de, 149 style, see form
romance genre, 2, 5–6, 16–17, 102–3, surveillance, 8, 52, 59, 61, 64, 172–4,
112–44, 201 n. 31, 202 n. 41, 203 201 n. 35
n. 47, 203 n. 55 Suzuki, Mihoko, 102
Rosenheim, James, 77–8
Rudrum, Alan, 154 Tallemant, Abbé Paul, 147
Thomas Sackville, sixth Earl of Dorset,
Salzman, Paul, 113 167
Sannazaro, Jacopo, 115 Todd, Janet, 143, 145, 160
satire, 122, 147, 148, 150 Topsell, Edward, 75–6
Schmitz, Götz, 86 Turner, James Grantham, 157
Schoeman, Ferdinand David, 172 typology, 21, 30, 38–42
Scodel, Joshua, 157
Scott, James, Duke of Monmouth, Uelman, Gerald, 174
151, 157
Scudéry, Madeleine de, 117, 137 Van Dyck, Anthony, 66–7
servants, 16–17, 54–83, 94–7, 104–5, Vaughan, Henry, 155
107–11, 130, 193 n. 26, Vaughan, Steven, 22–3
197 n. 64 Vertue, George, 70
see also households, masters Villiers, George, first Duke of
Shakespeare, William, 79, 118, 149 Buckingham, 56, 80–2
232 Index
Villiers, George, second Duke of Wheeler, Richard, 97

Buckingham, 56, 66, 67 Whigham, Frank, 62
voyeurism, 6, 17, 54, 85, 89, 93–4, Wilson, Bronwen, 3
110, 115–27, 139–44, 146–8, wives, see marriage
152, 177, 200 n. 21, Woolgar, C. M., 53
200 n. 23 Wroth (née Sidney), Lady Mary, 1–3,
14, 17, 112–15, 119–37, 144
Wall, Wendy, 65
Waller, Edmund, 152–5, 162–3 Yachnin, Paul, 3
Waller, Gary, 114
Warner, Michael, 4, 11 Zook, Melissa, 152
Wharton, Anne, 146–7 Zuckerberg, Mark, 176

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Early Modern Literature in History

General Editors: Cedric C. Brown, Emeritus Professor, University of Reading;

Early Modern Literature in History

Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke,

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

List of Tables and Figures viii

1 Performing Privacy and Early Modern Women 1

Works Cited 210

1.1 Views of Privacy 7

2.1 George Joye, transl., The Psalter of David in English [1544],

Over the years, I have benefited from the extraordinary generosity of

A privacy performed would, it seems, be a facsimile of true privacy.

dominant early modern religious and philosophical traditions limited

unmediated by art, constructing what I call an “erotics of authenticity.”

Table 1.1 Views of Privacy

Domestic privacy Extradomestic privacy

Privacy as freedom The modern family Ciceronian friendship

England, especially Aristotle’s view of the family as the domain of

applied to a person, “intimate or familiar … trusted; belonging to one’s

in the period was performative, a spectacle for public consumption

privacy. Performing Privacy and Gender examines the meanings of privacy

Habermasian label confounds our understanding of “private” and

publics.”32 Subaltern counterpublics may productively deliberate on

subjectivity, feminist critics in the main treated private and public

… while everything encouraged educated men to be public servants,

Implicit in Beilin’s classic formulation is a view of the public sphere

a welcome movement beyond dichotomies by showing that a public

By arranging ranks of servants at carefully negotiated degrees of proximity,

relations. Household orders provide a detailed view of how privacy was

sympathy, and hostility between an audience and public women, in this

while praising a different meaning of “interest”: an affective tie of mutual

In what follows, I seek to make sense of the meaning of privacy for

Historians often trace an emerging respect for privacy in early modern

involves a movement from the isolated privacy of despair to intimate

For as he whiche goeth to a kyng, composeth fyrst his behaviour,

Like a conduct guide or letter-writing manual, the excerpt then lists

Each poet/reader shared an exclusive privacy in relation to God, but also

Tyndale and tried unsuccessfully to save him from execution in 1536.

of complaining or lamenting to God.15 Of the 342 sermons on Isaiah

Calvin and Knox on Individual Laments: Triumph

The Book of Psalms comprises many forms, including individual and

the form of utterance necessary at the threshold to justification and

The exemples of God’s childrein alwayes complaining of their owne

Nevertheless, addressing oneself to God was an act fraught with terrors,

suggesting constraints lifted, favors conferred, and emotional closeness

the desyre he had to be restorit to that confort and consolatioun

Knox’s editor, David Laing, attempts to clarify Knox’s phrase “familiar

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?

The accusatory questions of psalm laments can only be understood

… when [God] apeiris to leif us a litill in our awne weak corruptioun,

he declair himself a trew, mercifull, and benyng Father towardis us,

Like a child who demonstrates precociousness by audacious questioning,

Were the lamenter to submit entirely to fear of God he would remain

Lock’s Laments: Shame and Exposure

by the accusations of Despair and Conscience, and finally approaches

Graunt thou me mercy, Lord: thee thee alone

In this “ripped hert,” Lock depicts a vivisection scene, a dramatically

This secrete wisedom hast thou graunted me,

Loke on me, Lord: though trembling I beknowe,

Lock’s surprising decision to paraphrase “Turne away thy face” with

The speaker’s pendulum swings between shame and self-exposure convey

Lock’s Plain Style: Abandonment and Control

The recurrence of a scene of exposure is one of many echoes in Lock’s

a great abuse” (Lock, 29). The demands, then, on an imitator of David