cod peice, coda, church marriage, tryst, polysemic, courtship, rhetoric, ambiguous, bawdy, coarse language
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229
Regard my strange mishapp
Jove father of the thunder
Send downe thy thunder-clapp
And rend her smock a sunder. (St. 12)
The lady rejoins:
If ever I returne Great Queene of lightning flashes
Sende downe thy fyre & burne
His cod-piece into ashes. (St. 5)
The lady adds a guarded, bawdy coda that can be read either as an invitation to kiss her arse or as the setting up of a tryst in Church, or even both; while obviously glancing at the prospect of a church marriage:
I can by no means misse thee
But I must haue thee one day
Sweet heart come home and kisse
Where I did sett on Sunday. (St. 6)
The multiple interpretations available from the lady’s answer (promising the humiliation of arse kissing, the prospect of marriage or a tryst) create an ambiguity that, although she assumes the coarse language of a scold, allow her to protect her modesty, or conceal her immodesty, depending upon how the poem is read. Just as importantly, the male persona’s bawdy address is equally polysemic courtship rhetoric rendered in the guise of sexual slander. The uninitiated reader is left asking whether he expresses illicit love, contempt or has more serious intentions.
Since these poems became detached from the context of their original composition they have been attributed variously to a Lady Jacob and Master Polden, a “Mr Lawson of St John’s Colledge” (answer only) and John Hoskins (answer only).
384
It is notable that whereas three male authors have attributions, only one woman is given credit for the answer. It is reasonable to assume that such ambiguous reciprocations of emotion in verse,
384 See Marotti (1994), p.165 (n.68). John Wardroper (ed.) suggests Lawson might be “Peter Lawson of St. John’s, Oxford (died 1619)”, Lovers, Rakes and Rogues: Amatory, Merry and Bawdy Verse from 1580 to 1830 (Shelfmark, 1995), p.344. For other versions of the poems see Cat. Anon 53.
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