Late-Elizabethan and Jacobean Women’s Verse Answering

Examined through the lens of the female-voiced courtly answers of the 1530s it seems predictable that women’s roles as poets would frequently be ones in which they were the respondents rather than the initiators. The effect of the poems considered so far is to close down the gap between the Petrarchan lover and the apotheosised beloved, and thereby to create the potential for a literary space that women were eventually able to exploit. The question remains as to why this appears not to have happened until the second half of the sixteenth century. It is a phenomena explained, in part, by the respectability conferred upon those women whose answer-poetry is extant by their advanced age and/or high social status, combined with the likelihood of their exposure to the verse exchanges in circulation that originated in the Henrician court. ⁴⁰⁰ Of the four women I examine in detail in this section, Elizabeth I was in the final decades of her life when she wrote most of her answers, Lady Mary Cheke was likewise advanced in age, having

⁴⁰⁰ Where the licence afforded by age is concerned it is reasonable that once women passed childbearing age they might no longer feel the association between loose speech and wanton sexuality to apply to themselves quite so rigorously. In Stefano Guazzo’s Civile Conuersation Annabell disparages the loquaciousness of those “good elderly women [who] use themselues like young wanton gyrles, & being women, behaue themselues as boldly as men: whereby they muche diminish their credite and reputation”, The Civile Conuersation of M. Steeuen Guazzo: Written First in Italian, and Nowe Translated Out of French by George Pettie, Deuided into Foure Bookes (printed by Richard Watkins, 1581), sig. Pv^r, STC 12422. Subsequent references