John Harington, Mary Cheke, Old Testament, preacher, clergyman, misogynist

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merely “mildly anti-feminist”. ⁴²⁴ Actually, Harington uses the persona of an incompetent preacher in order to set Cheke a patronising test to put him right. The preacher is only the bait and, by situating any prospective respondent as his student answering the question he has set, Harington choreographs the exchange in order to perpetuate the notion of women’s intellectual inferiority while simultaneously offering the opportunity to refute his inept, misogynist preacher.

He begins: “Thear was, not serten when, a certayn preacher/ That never learnt and yet became a teacher” (ll.1-2). This poorly educated clergyman, with his small “latten” (l.3), focuses upon one of the most unremarkable biblical phrases, “Era quidam homo” (“there was a certain man”, l.4). His attempt to extract theological significance from the passage leads him to the tenuous conclusion, “But yet I think in all the bible no man/ Can finde this text: thear was a certain woman” (ll.13-14). Harington knows this proposition to be untrue, and he employs the preacher as a foil in order to set a patronising and simple pedagogic test to spot the deliberate error, and to “finde this text: thear was a certain woman”.

Women’s absence from some parts of the Bible, such as in the patrilineal genealogies of the Old Testament, is conspicuous, but Harington has something more specific in mind, and he has made sure that his prospective respondent (he may or may not have been addressing Cheke specifically) is not short of evidence with which to refute the preacher’s claim. ⁴²⁵ Cheke responds, “That no man yet could in the bible finde/ A certayne woeman

⁴²⁴ May (1999), p.245.
⁴²⁵ The possibility that Cheke was the poem’s intended audience and dupe is made more tantalising by another of Harington’s epigrams in which he is probably also baiting her, this time for eccentricities of toilette and etiquette. In his ‘Of Kissing the Cheeke’, he writes, “Is’t for a grace? or is’t for some dislike,/ When others kisse with lip, you giue the cheeke”. Rather than come into physical contact with her over-painted face, he decides kissing her glove to be preferable because, “Your glou’s perfum’d, your lip and cheeke are painted” (ll.1-2 and l.8), Epigrams both Pleasant and Seriovs, Written by that All-Worthy Knight, Sir Iohn Harrington and Neuer before Printed (printed for Iohn Budge, 1615), sig. Biii, STC 12775.5 (subsequent references for this text are given in parentheses following quotations). In the 1618 edition the title reads ‘Of a Lady that Gives the Cheeke’, The Most Elegant and Witty Epigrams of Sir

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