courtship, seduction, Puttenham, Allegoria, tactical, strategic, rhetorical, erotics, enigmatic, ambiguous

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intention are more likely to elicit favourable responses. At the very least they attract answers that give the impression that the correspondents are on a fairly even standing intellectually and socially, and that aren’t condescendingly tetchy about the suitor’s unsophisticated approach. Ilona Bell describes the “poetics of courtship” as also being an “erotics of secrecy”. She writes, “for the Elizabethans, poetry was the preferred language of courtship and seduction precisely because both poetry and seduction are, by their very nature, enigmatic and ambiguous”. ³⁷⁶ And Catherine Bates concurs that “wooing a member of the opposite sex came to be regarded as a highly complex, tactical, and strategic rhetorical procedure”. ³⁷⁷

The propriety of ambiguity is also apparent in numerous amorous verse exchanges, clear evidence that this sort of verse exchange was favoured in practice as well as in theory. Puttenham includes an amorous verse exchange among his examples of Allegoria which he describes as the “figure of false semblant or dissimulation”:

Louely Lady I long full sore to heare,
If ye remaine the same, I left you the last yeare.

To whom she answered in allegorie other two verses:

My louing Lorde I will well that ye wist,
The thred is spon, that neuer shall vntwist. ³⁷⁸

The ambiguity of the petitioning poem leads Bell to ask, “Is the writer inquiring about the lady’s health, or seeking patronage? Or is he a clandestine suitor?” ³⁷⁹ Regardless of the poet’s intention, it is his guarded ambivalence that facilitates a favourable response and, although this answer is not definitely in the affirmative, it participates in the conceit without condescension in a way that

³⁷⁶ Ilona Bell, ‘Women in the Lyric Dialogue of Courtship: Whitney’s Admonition to al yong Gentilwomen and Donne’s “The Legacie”’, in Pebworth and Summers eds (1997), pp.76-92 (p.79).
³⁷⁷ Catherine Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), p.11.
³⁷⁸ Puttenham (repr. 1968), p.155 and p.156.
³⁷⁹ Ilona Bell, Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), p.67.

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