Dido, classical heroine, Whitney, Angelus Sabinus, Ovid, dialogism, Carthage, complaint, genre

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her and warns other women not to fall for the same arts of seduction. ³⁴³ The equivalence that Whitney finds between Dido and herself allows her to turn her attention away from her own plight and towards Dido’s predicament by way of a conciliatory response to the classical heroine.

The complaint answer-poem can be traced back to the male-voiced answers in the Heroides and to Angelus Sabinus’s responses to Ovid’s verse epistles. Heroidean complaint poems, with or without answers, became increasingly fashionable among poets, often associated with the Inns, following Turbervile’s translation of Ovid’s verse letters along with Sabinus’s three responses in 1567. ³⁴⁴ Although the complaint genre (female or otherwise) has received much critical attention (as has Whitney’s rendering of a female complaint in her Copy of A Letter), the dialogism of this type of writing and Whitney’s engagement with it have been largely overlooked. ³⁴⁵

In her address to Dido, ‘A Carefull Complaynt by the Vnfortunate Auctor’, Whitney consoles the classical heroine by assuring her that the plight she endures in sixteenth-century London is more intense than that caused by Æneas’s abandonment of her in Carthage:

³⁴² ‘The Auctor to the Reader’, sig. Av^v.

³⁴³ See ‘I. W. To her Vnconstant Louer’ and ‘The Admonition by the Auctor, to all Yong Gentilwomen and to al Other Maids Being in Loue’ in which she warns her readers to “Be ware of fayre and painted talke” such as that taught to lover’s by “Ovid within his Arte of loue”, sigs Aii^r-Aviii^v (Avi^r).

³⁴⁴ See n.9. Such complaints include Cat. Anon 23, T 281 and T 286. For more such complaints see Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’: A Critical Anthology, ed. John Kerrigan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

³⁴⁵ See, for instance, Wendy Wall, ‘Isabella Whitney and the Female Legacy’, ELH, 58:1 (1991), 35-62 and Paul A. Marquis, ‘Oppositional Ideologies of Gender in Isabella Whitney’s Copy of a Letter’, MLR, 90 (1995), 314-24. Louise Schleiner, however, is particularly alert to the socially dialogic context of Whitney’s writing in her Tudor and Stuart Women Writers: With Verse Translations from Latin by Connie McQuillen, from Greek by Lynn E. Roller (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994), see pp.1-14.

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