Whitney, gallants, moderate speech, satirist, single-mindedness, Christian, epistemology, Hugh Plat, verse epistle
<< previous
next >>
205
incongruity between Whitney’s ingenuously generous bequests and the cupidity of the city and its citizens. For instance, of town gallants she reasons, “Because their keeping craueth cost,/ I yet wil leaue him more” (sig. Eiiiv). Thus, although we are told in the title that she leaves the city by “her friendes procurement”, what we witness is Whitney abandoning the advice of C. B. to “make accompt for friendship” and becoming an isolated malcontent once epistolary communication with her friends is severed. Whitney has had independence and lack of patronage thrust upon her by her diminished circumstances following her claimed expulsion from service, but her rejection of her friends also indicates that this is a path she has chosen herself.
Claudio Guillén observes that the verse epistle is “the countergenre of satire” and that they therefore “imply and involve each other”.
351
The juxtaposition of the two genres here illustrates clearly the psychological transition that occurs when the communicative reasoning between friends, that promises moderate speech and behaviour, is replaced by the single-mindedness of a satirist, which goes together with excess and, in this instance, the moral decay that is concomitant with exacting revenge. The backward looking conversation with the pagan heroine, Dido, and forward looking Christian epistemology, moreover, are now supplanted by the narrowed epistemological framework of her immediate, secular “comunication” with contemporary London (sig. Eiir). It must be observed here that Whitney manufactures this departure in order to finally assert an independent, female authorial presence which has been subdued throughout the miscellany. The lyrics in her miscellany draw attention to their imitation of Hugh Plat’s Floures of Philosophie (1572) and therefore stand as a disclaimer against originality, and in these
351 Claudio Guillén, ‘Notes Toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter’, in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (London and Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1986), 70-101 (p.88).
<< previous
next >>
Stumble It!
