Aristotelian, values, friendship, philosophical, epigrams, moderation, Dido, Whitney, Christian stoicism, discourse on friendship

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series of answer-poems in which successive speakers claim to endure more hardship than the person they answer. As the sequence progresses, however, the dialectical position shifts towards recognition of the Aristotelian values of egalitarian friendship and moderation, which contribute towards tempering the correspondents’ outlook. This pagan stoic perspective is then refined by

C. B. who supplants it with Christian stoicism. Just as Aristotle’s discourse on friendship serves Googe’s friends as a source of reference and orientation for their dialogue with Googe, the hundred and ten philosophical epigrams found in Whitney’s miscellany provide maxims on the themes of friendship and patience in adversity that furnish her correspondents with subject matter for their replies.

At the outset of the miscellany Whitney explains that she has been cast off from service by an outraged mistress due to some unspecified malicious gossip or scandal surrounding her, maybe relating to a failed love affair or broken engagement. ³⁴² Her friends and supporters are gathered around her in the letters section not only to offer advice but to display a united front against her detractors (C. B., in his response to her, promises that “Thy friends that haue thee knowne of long,/ Will not regard thy enemies tong”, ‘In Answer by C. B. to Is. W.’, sig. Dvii^r). Strangely, however, this section of the ‘Friendly Letters’ begins with an address to an imaginary friend and ends with Whitney’s retreat into solitude in which she turns away from dialogue and towards the individualism of satire. One suspects from the arrangement of the poems that they are as much about the function of epistolary friendship as they are instances of friends rallying to Whitney’s defence.

In the opening epistle Whitney responds to Dido’s epistolary protest against Æneas’s abandonment of her from Heroides VII. Dido’s complaint is aligned with Whitney’s earlier work, The Copy of a Letter, in which she also complains of a faithless man who has jilted

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