The language of arboreal metamorphosis in Lady Mary Wroth’s pastoral song “The Spring Now Come att Last” from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) may invoke the myth of Apollo and Daphne. However, the Ovidian narrative so central to Petrarchan poetics celebrates the male poet by erasing the female voice. This essay instead explores parallels between Wroth’s poem and the metamorphosis of the Heliades, who turn into poplars while mourning their brother Phaeton in book 2 of the Metamorphoses. Their transformation is predicated on an act of female speech, however precarious and evanescent. This alternative Ovidian scenario offers a model of lyric that capitalizes on the brief resonance that the female voice acquires at the point of vanishing. By deploying it in her song, Wroth not only rewrites Petrarch through Ovid in order to articulate a gendered lyric voice but shows herself a poet attuned to the crucial developments in English lyric of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in particular the complex relationship between the Petrarchan and the Ovidian legacies.
This essay investigates the rhetoric of royal imprisonment in Ane Detectioun of the duinges of Marie Quene of Scottes (1571), one of the most famous contemporary texts associated with the Marian controversy. This Anglo-Scots pamphlet not only invokes Mary’s actual incarceration but also represents her as a captive of erotic desire, a slave of unruly passion, and a prisoner of the law. This multifaceted vision of royal incarceration is animated by a heterogeneous tradition of ideological writing in medieval and early modern England and Scotland. Three strands of a rich mosaic of interlocking discourses are analyzed: the imagery of a ruler imprisoned by passions found in Boethius’s Consolatio; a courtly love allegory in which royal eros submits to the bondage of legal constraint in The Kingis Quair; and the figurations of limited monarchy as royal incarceration in the Anglo-Scots political philosophy of John Fortescue and George Buchanan. Much more than a broadly gendered metaphor for queenly submission, this language of royal imprisonment derives its legitimacy from discourses that touch upon the very ideological foundations of English and Scottish monarchy.
The Precarity of Lyric Ontology inElizabethan Sonnets E lizabethan sonnets have been frequently recruited to substantiate claims about early modern English literature, culture, and society which transcend the notion of Petrarchan language as a conventional idiom of heterosexual love. Protean and elastic, Petrarchan metaphorics provided a vehicle for many forms of ideological labour across Renaissance Europe and the Americas. In early modern England, the lexicon of frustrated love has been shown to resonate with a panoply of sociocultural discourses: the politics of courtliness under Elizabeth I; 1 the emergence of class as a category of social distinction; 2 the vicissitudes of early modern gender; 3 the articulation of nationhood; 4 the pursuit of acquisitive desires; 5 the legal imaginary; 6 and the project of colonial expansion. 7 But Petrarch's Rime sparse, which insistently thematises its own textuality, also furnished Renaissance poets with a nuanced vocabulary for theorizing broader questions of ars poetica, especially lyric.
This essay addresses the intriguing frequency of insect lyrics in seventeenth-century English poetry. While dramatic developments in the scientific and artistic regimes, including the invention of the microscope and the rise of still-life painting, undoubtedly played a role in this proliferation of entomological texts, this essay suggests that the figure of the insect was also deployed by early modern poets to probe the formal and imaginative potentialities of lyric, a genre that assumed a prominence over the course of the seventeenth century. The diminutive size, brief lifespan, and intricate anatomy of insects resonate with the formal qualities of lyric as short, compressed, and technically demanding objects of poetic matter, and the ambivalent attitudes to insects embody the contradictions surrounding the early modern idea of lyric. By using the life of fleas, glowworms, flies, bees, and grasshoppers to think through questions of lyric ontology, early modern poets from Donne to Killigrew redraw the familiar contours of the lyric genre as a contested territory of fascination and disgust with insect poiesis caught between human and animal, nature and machine, and life and death.
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