Female-Voiced Responses to Courtship: The Circumspect Lover versus the Plain-Speaking Suitor of Henrician Court Answer-Poetry

One of the origins of women’s adoption of the answer-poem as an appropriately feminine literary endeavour is doubtlessly the female-voiced answer-poem found in numerous amorous verse dialogues in which the woman’s part is ventriloquised. The most usual context in which such answers appear is in response to amorous or courtly verses that, for our purposes, can be divided into two basic types: the plain speaking Petrarchan sprezzatura and the ambiguous courtship poem in which the lover’s meaning is encoded shallowly within the poem so that its import is allusive rather than explicit. The two types tend to elicit distinctly different responses since, in a cultural environment where women’s sexual activity was regulated strictly, discretion was essential in the ritual of courtship and a rash admirer might be discounted quickly.

Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier is among the literature offering insight into why bluntness might be regarded as both an ungraceful and unprofitable strategy of courtship. A courtier should approach his beloved

with such sober moode, and so warily, that the wordes may first attempt the minde, and so doubtfully touch her entent and will, that they may leave her a way and a certain issue to faine the understanding that those wordes containe love, to the entent if he finde any daunger, hee may draw backe and make wise to have spoken or written it to another ende. (III. p.246)

Such caution is evident in numerous amorous verse exchanges both real and fictional, and they indicate that poems initiating amorous dialogues by speaking darkly or obscurely of their